Forthcoming Workshops and Projects

(See also: Workshops & Projects 2007-8; Workshops & Projects 2008-9; Workshops & Projects 2009-10)

Workshops

2009-2010 EAG Lecture Series in European Energy Security: Oct 2009 - June 2010

Project leader: Dr Amelia Hadfield
Institution: University of Kent

Divided into six separate sessions held between October 2009 and April 2010, each workshop will feature the research of three guest speakers: a CEELBAS academic, a think tank representative/policy maker and a member of the Energy Analysis Group. Each workshop will also have a discussant to analyse the presented papers and to lead the subsequent Q&A session, as well as a Rapporteur to minute the discussion and draft a subsequent working document. Each session's three guests have been selected to shed both inter-disciplinary and thematic light on a particular area of European Energy Security. View programme.

Recent Developments in the Post-Soviet Media Landscape: Ukraine, Belarus and Russia: 23rd June 2010 

Project leader: Galina Miazhevich
Institution: University of Oxford

The aims of the workshop are three-fold: 1) to question the transferability of the concept of ‘globalised democracy’ to the post-Soviet media, 2) to explore the intersection of new and traditional media in post-Soviet space and 3) to provide the grounds for a critical reflection on the interaction between media, politics and culture in the three selected states, focusing in particular on how developments in the Ukrainian and Belarusian media systems reflect, resist, interact with and differ from those in Russia. Involving leading international academics dealing with the media in Ukraine, Belarus and Russia, as well as practising journalists/media analysts from the region, and from the West, the overarching goal of the workshop is to identify the underlying logic driving post-Soviet media transformations, and to project those transformations into the future. View workshop programme.

'Can I See Your ID?' Personhood and Paperwork in and after the Soviet Union: 24th -25th September 2010

Project Leader: Nikolai Ssorin-Chaikov
Institution: University of Cambridge

This workshop brings together 12 speakers whose research has explored the social and affective lives of documents in and after the Soviet Union. It will address how issues of state security in the Former Soviet Union translate into the everyday politics of personal identity, informing policies and attitudes towards key contemporary social themes such as migration, citizenship, social inclusion and exclusion, and the modern city. It will also bring a particular philosophical, historical and anthropological perspective to debates that have generally been dominated by political science and international relations. How do papers enter the lives of those who hold them? What kinds of affective and social relations do they elicit?  What notions of person do they constitute, and, conversely, in which culturally and historically specific understandings of personhood does the ‘documented self’ come to acquire meaning? How do these documents affect and constitute geographical movement of people across the vast post-Soviet terrain and what Soviet legacies of territorial residency they reveal? And, more generally, what does the proliferation of identification documents - the fact that we are not fully a person without papers, and that that these papers are not merely texts but also certain kinds of material objects - do for contemporary theoretical debates about subjects and objects, persons and things, the blurring of the social and the material?
Online registration is now open. Further details of the workshop, including a detailed programme, information on how to register and accommodation options in Cambridge can be found on the CRASSH website.

Research ethics and the practicalities of doing fieldwork in Russia, Central and Eastern Europe: 30th-31st October 2010

Project leader: Ulrike Ziemer
Institution: UCL

This two-day inter-disciplinary ethics workshop will bring together academics and postgraduate students within  Russian and East European Studies. The workshop will consist of seven sessions which will address the following points: (1) Ethics and researching the internet; (2) Ethical issues in researchon ‘extreme’ or fringe groups; (3) Ethics and researching political and business elites (4) Archives and ethical issues; (5) Ethical issues and research on vulnerable groups; (6) Ethical issues and
research in conflict zones; (7) Ethical issues in an era of institutional paranoia.

Why Democracy for the Post-Socialist Societies?: 5th November 2010

Project Leader: David Lane
Institution: University of Cambridge

Building upon the networks created by the previous CEELBAS-supported workshops on ‘International Elites and the Formation of Political Identity in Post Soviet Space’, this workshop aims to uncover the conditions which concurrently drove market and political reforms in communist societies and to clarify the relationship between economic market reforms and democratic political ones. Involving specialists from political theory, international relations, area specialists on the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe and specialists form Asia and China, the workshop brings together various strands of research and theorising on the post-Soviet space (including China) and on what kind of democracy (or other form of governance) may arise in countries of the post-USSR and China. Have pluralist politics and competitive electoral democracy in the European post-communist societies been the basis of political stability and economic growth? Are less pluralistic societies of Russia and other states of the Commonwealth of Independent States a better political model for China? What can Russia, Ukraine and the central Asian republics of the former USSR learn from China?

Privatisation in Russia 1991 - 1996: Decisions and Outcomes: 12th-13th November 2010

Project Leader: Carol Leonard
Institution: University of Oxford

This workshop will explore a range of important and hotly-debated issues relating to privatisation in Russia, addressing in the process key CEELBAS research themes such as institutions and governance, knowledge-based economies, and health and well-being. Involving leading and early-career scholars from the CEELBAS network and from other UK and international institutions, as well as representatives from policy making and external expert groups, privatisation policy over the half-decade from 1991 to 1996 will be re-examined in order to bring a fresh assessment of its success and outcomes as we approach the twenty-year mark. In so doing, the workshop will review important and still controversial transition policies, obtain estimates of the policies and their impact from those who helped create them and from leading experts, assess the broader impact of privatisation on the population, and place the Russian experience in the broader context of institutional and economic transformation.

Representing Sarajevo in the 1990s and Beyond: date TBC

Project leader: Karoline Von Oppen
Institution: University of Bath

This interdisciplinary workshop will bring together literary, film and media scholars to examine representations of the city of Sarajevo during the Bosnian War and after. It will for instance include texts by figures as diverse as German author Norbert Gstrein, Spanish author Juan Goytisolo, French philosopher Bernard Henri Levy, war reporter Martin Bell, cartoonist Joe Sacco, and Irish rock band U2 amongst others. Through the narrow focus on Sarajevo researchers from a broad range of disciplines can find common ground to examine the changing face and significance of the city in the “western” imagination, and to study notions of multiculturalism, the presence of Islam in Europe and intellectual political engagement. Non-academic reflections will be invited through the participation of authors and war reporters. This workshop is planned as the first stage of a research network, which will end with an international conference in Sarajevo in 2012 to mark the 10 year anniversary of the start of the siege of the city.

Public Engagement and Knowledge Exchange Workshop: Feb 2011

Project leader: Alena Ledeneva
Institution: UCL

As a contribution to methodology training, career training and awareness, the workshop’s goals are to overview KE activities undertaken by individual and organisational members of CEELBAS; to create typology of forms of impact produced outside academia; to assess feedback from the KE partners; and to assess strategies of generating and measuring short-term and long-term impact.

Rottenbeat: Academic and musical dialogue with new Russian punk: 1st-10th May 2011

Project Leader: Hilary Pilkington
Institution: University of Warwick

This project will link an open academic-practitioner workshop on the contemporary Russian artistic ‘underground’ – drawing on the well established international network of scholars from the ‘Doing Culture’ and ‘Situating Culture’ series of workshops funded by CEELBAS and also involving a much broader range of non-academic professionals such as music producers, journalists, cultural critics etc – with a series of three live (not-for-profit) gigs in London, Manchester and the West Midlands at which three invited punt/avant-garde bands would play. The workshop will include a key note speaker addressing issues of relevance in contemporary underground culture, a panel of academic papers presenting provisional research findings from the AHRC funded ‘Post-socialist punk’ project, a panel in which members of three bands talk about their music and ideas, a panel addressing methodological issues associated with the project, and visual and audio displays.

Russian Archive Training Scheme: April 2011

Project Leader: Polly Jones
Institution: UCL

This well-established scheme consists of a week-long archive-training workshop in Russia, organised via collaboration between CEELBAS member institutions, CRCEES and BASEES, to train doctoral students from all CEELBAS and CRCEES institutions, as well as other universities subject to demand. The workshop, planned for early April 2011, will consist of daily researcher-led visits to a wide range of Moscow’s state and party archives and libraries. Doctoral students will acquire the practical and methodological expertise to conduct their research effectively on subsequent longer research trips. They will make their first forays into the Moscow archives as part of an organised group and they will network and share experiences with other doctoral students. The intensive timetable of visits focuses on learning how to locate relevant material in the archives and library, how to order it and make the best use of time available. Students will also familiarise themselves with the country and the difficulties it presents, deepening their practical area knowledge. View report of the April 2010 workshop.

Language Projects

Materials for developing language skills for postgraduate students of Polish and Czech

Project leaders: Ludek Knittl and Karolina Ziolo
Institution: University of Sheffield

This is an innovative project, addressing the gap in language skills encountered by advanced students of Czech and Polish. It will create materials aimed at advanced learners who are looking to improve their language skills for postgraduate research or for career purposes. Two parallel language-specific strands which will be developed using an IBL (Inquiry Based Learning) approach to help students explore the various uses of the language. Ten interactive web-based self-study units in each language will be produced, made up of pre-reading exercises, an original spoken or written text (for example an audio recording or a part of a movie or TV show with glossary and cultural background where necessary) and post-reading exercises.

Productive Language for Fieldwork Training: Russian

Project leader: Anna Pleshakova
Institution: University of Oxford

The creation of this ‘productive language for fieldwork’ course will enhance the teaching of Russian across CEELBAS universities by taking into consideration the real needs of postgraduate learners carrying out work in Russian research environments. A series of innovative exercises and explanations will be produced using WebLearn Beta and VLE tools, as well as a range of contemporary Russian language materials such as authentic e-mails, letters of application to work at Russian archives, recorded telephone conversations, and video and audio interviews with Russian social scientists, film producers, writers and politicians. The project aims to develop a structured and efficient language course with a high level of learner autonomy suitable for classroom application and independent study.

The Development of Online Materials Enhancing Oral Fluency in Polish

Project leader: Ewa Ochman
Institution: University of Manchester

The purpose of the project is to produce two sets of online teaching materials which would enable MA and PhD students at Beginners and Intermediate levels of Polish to develop skills needed to communicate effectively in a wide range of situations and to enhance understanding of the social context in which language is being used. Each set of materials would consist of 24 units corresponding with length of the course. Once completed, these materials would be made available for use to CEELBAS partner institutions.

Reading Strategies for Postgraduates: the Finno-Ugric Interface 2 - Estonian element

Project Leader: Kristiina McCabe
Institution: UCL

The production of an Estonian word-frequency dictionary, specifically designed for post-graduate students, whose study pathways include Politics, Economics and Sociology. The process involves scanning 300,000 Estonian words (100,000 each on politics, finance/economics, and sociology) of recent text (newspaper articles and academic texts no older than 2007) in order to disseminate the most frequent nouns, verbs, compound verbs and verbal prefixes, the latter two of which are an inherent and integral part of the Estonian language.

Communicative Ukrainian for fieldwork and research

Project Leader: Marta Jenkala
Institution: UCL

The project will produce a course of web-based Ukrainian language materials (in a format broadly similar to the Read Ukrainian! course) for postgraduate students and others undertaking fieldwork in Ukraine or a Ukrainian-speaking environment They will focus primarily on the skills of comprehension and production of study- or fieldwork-related spoken Ukrainian, as well as on the production of initial drafts of basic written texts such as survey or focus-group questionnaires, research summaries, form-filling for access to libraries and archives etc. These demand-led materials will consist of 10 units covering areas of greatest relevance to researchers, to be identified and discussed at meetings of one or more focus groups (comprising postgraduate students, post-doctoral researchers and academic staff working on Ukraine-related subjects at CEELBAS partner institutions).

Reading Strategies for Postgraduates: The Finno-Ugric Interface 2 - Finnish and Hungarian elements

Project Leaders: Daniel Abondolo, Riitta-Liisa Valijarvi and Eszter Tarsoly
Institution: UCL

Following on from the previous CEELBAS-project to produce graded readers of Finnish and Hungarian for postgraduate students, this project will 1) produce four more chapters for each graded reader, 2) continue testing the materials in practice, and 3) investigate the different approaches used in the materials that teach postgraduate students to acquire reading skills in these morphologically complex languages. Each unit addresses one main and several additional grammar points among those that proved to be the most relevant for reading. The units also include sections on the lexicon; namely, word formation, the use of dictionaries, and methods for acquiring the seemingly impenetrable vocabulary of Finnish and Hungarian.

Aural materials to support PG students’ Fieldwork: Serbian and Croatian

Project Leader: Jelena Calic
Institution: UCL

The creation of a collection of audio materials with accompanying activities and exercises with a special focus on enabling postgraduate students to effectively and successfully conduct interviews. The materials will comprise samples of fifteen interviews, divided into five thematic blocks covering frequently researched topics such as migration, human rights, urbanisation, culture, and politics/current affairs – chosen in collaboration with historians and social scientists – and will comprise samples taken from the Bosnian, Croatian, Serbian and Montenegrin media as well as items from students’ private collections (with appropriate copyright permission). Exercises will be specifically tailored to help the development of listening comprehension skills, promoting the use of ‘top-down’ skills such as using non-linguistic cues and prior knowledge. They will be followed by fieldwork-orientated activities, in which students will be asked to work in groups to create their own questionnaires and mock interviews.

Enhancing reading skills for Polish for research purposes

Project Leader: Dorota Holowiak
Institution: UCL

Project to research and explore new ways of enhancing reading comprehension skills in Polish and consequently equip ab initio students with a reading competence adequate to meeting the demands of thesis-writing. One main aim of the project is to address language patterns that indicate mode and information structure in specialist written discourse and to prepare teaching materials that would aid students in acquiring confidence when tackling original publications. Another outcome envisaged is a guide to reading strategies and techniques, which would help improve overall reading competency and which would link to the CEELBAS research agenda in areas such as corruption, migration and national identity.

Oral Russian for Fieldwork course materials

Project Leader: Cai Wilkinson
Institution: University of Birmingham

The materials will be designed for use by language tutors preparing postgraduates for fieldwork either on a weekly or intensive basis. The course is designed to be used in conjunction with the previously-developed CEELBAS-funded Intermediate Russian Aural for Fieldwork course materials to form the basis of a Masters level course delivered via a combination of tutor-led activities (either classroom-based or via video chat platform such as Skype with online support for collaborative creation of word webs such as google.docs). The aim of the course is to equip postgraduate students with sufficient “survival Russian” to assist them in orientating themselves and functioning in a Russophone environment, including making logistical arrangements and interacting with respondents, research assistants and translators. The materials make extensive use of modelling, role plays and dialogue flow charts to facilitate the acquisition of a range of responses (words and phrases) that the student can deploy as appropriate, and which can subsequently be adapted to individual circumstances by the student. An additional aim is the development of templates that can be used as a basis for the development of similar course materials in other languages.

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