Endangered Bodies & Activism – Bodies in Focus: Power, Subjectivity, and Practice in East European and Eurasian Studies

This six-part virtual event series will examine body matters within Eurasia through a variety of disciplines and themes. The body-as-method has emerged recently to provide novel insights on society, culture, and identity by foregrounding alternatives to Western traditions that marginalized the corporeal dimensions of social and personal existence.

Why is the body good “to think with” on both intellectual and professional matters?
How do classed, diversely abled, gendered, and raced bodies interact in the daily lives we study or inhabit through our avocations?
What is the continuously evolving relationship between the body and the body politic, whether the nation, empire, the EU, or NATO?
Is research and teaching disembodying and can recentering “embodied and uncomfortable knowledge” therefore move liberation in East European and Eurasian Studies forward?

To address these questions, “Bodies in Focus” will have six virtual, recorded panels featuring speakers from various disciplines and institutions. Panelists and the audience will explore how bodies matter for the study and teaching of East European and Eurasian social and material environments, our understanding of power and equity, and for the cultivation of human capacities in our field.

January 24. Endangered Bodies & Activism

11:00 am – 12:30 pm (EST) | 10:00 am – 11:30 am (CST) | 8:00 -9:30 am (PST)

REGISTER

Moderator: Darya Tsymbalyuk, University of Chicago

Speakers: Zhanar Sekerbayeva, Kazakhstan Feminist Initiative “Feminita”
Oksana Kazmina, Kone Foundation (Finland)
Aydin Khalilov, Independent Living Center for People with Disability (Azerbaijan)