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A Point of Order!

October 15, 2014 @ 4:00 pm - 6:00 pm

Join us on October 15, 2014, for a lecture by Dr. Oleg Kharkhordin titled “A Point of Order! The Troubled Travels of Robert’s Rules of Order from America to Russia, or How Russians Tried to Invent Order Themselves.”

Recent research on civil society in Russia has shown that Russians rarely have adequate discursive techniques to arrive at a rapid and effective judgment on what a given group or association wants to do. There is no in between register of disinterested and polite speech for equals united in deliberation. Instead, during their group meetings Russians are either speaking in a highly emotional love/hate language of livejournal or intense Russian friendship, or rely on stale formulations of the language of official documents of state and federal politics. One obvious way of dealing with this condition would be to introduce a good translation of Robert’s Rules of Order, but two translations done in 1992 have already spectacularly failed. Another option would be to write an analogue of this book, adapted, however, for Russian culture. The presentation will discuss previous attempts to produce Russian manuals for maintaining decorum and discursive order, particularly those by the deputies of the first tzarist Dumas in 1906-1917, and by the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks. Then we will discuss how these attempts fared in the Soviet days, and what the future may hold for us.

Kharkhordin graduated from the Economics Department of Leningrad University, subsequently joining the postgraduate program of the Institute of World Economy and International Relations of the USSR Academy of Sciences and the doctoral program of the University California, Berkeley (PhD, political science, 1996). He then assumed the position of a Junior Member of the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies (1996-1998), and over the years has taught extensively as a Visiting Professor in the U.S. (e.g. Yale, Political Science, Spring 2002, and Harvard, Government, 2002-2003) and in France at Sciences Po, Paris (2005, 2006, 2008).

As Chair of the Department of Political Science and Sociology of EUSP (1998-2001), he started IMARS (International MA in Russian Studies), a novel program for graduate students from Western Europe and North America. He served as Vice-Rector for Development at EUSP since 2005, where he was actively involved in creating the EUSP Fund. The Fund, which is the second university endowment to be registered in Russia (2007), has since then ranked among the top three Russian university endowments in size. Elected Rector in 2009, Prof. Kharkhordin has become the first Russian university president with a U.S. PhD degree. He has been a member of the Russian Presidential Council for Science and Education since 2012.

 

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Details

Date:
October 15, 2014
Time:
4:00 pm - 6:00 pm
Event Categories:
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Venue

NYU Jordan Center for the Advanced Study of Russia
19 University Place, 2nd Floor
New York, NY 10003 United States
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Phone
212.992.6575