March 15, 2013 | 2:30 to 6:00 PM | The Jordan Center's Diasporas Project
To RSVP click HERE
Sponsored by the the Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies and the Jordan Center for the Advanced Study of Russia. It makes sense to consider that people move about in spaces as a matter of course, in ways that defy conventional boundaries of nation and culture. Studies that bring us from China to western Eurasia consider these spaces as supra-national and perfectly normal, until nation-states make them seem abnormal. The same applies to multinational Russia itself, as the old Empire, as the USSR, and as the former Soviet Union where very many people were born in a country now called something else.
The Diasporas Project at NYU
The Diasporas Project is a series organized by the Jordan Center for the Advanced Study of Russia in spring 2013. It is part of the Center’s inaugural year and we are grateful to the many units around NYU that have been offering help and guidance. Sessions are co-organized with Ireland House (31 January - 1 February), Kevorkian (14 - 15 March), and Hebrew and Judaic Studies (25 - 26 April).
The overarching purpose of the project is twofold: to consider the shared characteristics and shared assumptions that underpin the idea of a diaspora, and in the process erode our parochialisms; and to better grasp what is at stake and what is assumed when we cast movement as a diaspora rather than say an emigration, a migration, sex trafficking, slavery, or a flow of refugees. The project in no way aims to settle these questions one way or another; rather it aims to address them intelligently and forthrightly, as a guide to students and colleagues.
15 March 2013
2:30 - 6:00 PM EST
Spaces of Movement
Zvi Benite, NYU
Eliot Borenstein, NYU
Philippa Hetherington, Harvard
Willard Sunderland, Cincinnati
For more information, please contact jordan.russia.center@nyu.edu.