This event was held virtually as a Zoom webinar and streamed via YouTube Live.
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Please join us for an event in the Minority Inclusion and Exclusion in Soviet and Post-Communist Societies Speaker Series, a discussion with Jennifer J. Carroll, Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Elon University and the author of Narkomania: Drugs, HIV, and Citizenship in Ukraine (Cornell University Press, 2019).
Against the backdrop of a post-Soviet state set aflame by geopolitical conflict and violent revolution, Narkomania considers whether substance use disorders are everywhere the same and whether our responses to drug use presuppose what kind of people those who use drugs really are. Jennifer J. Carroll’s ethnography is a story about public health and international efforts to quell the spread of HIV. Carroll focuses on Ukraine where the prevalence of HIV among people who use drugs is higher than in parts of sub-Saharan Africa and unpacks the arguments and myths surrounding medication-assisted treatment (MAT) in Ukraine. What she presents in Narkomania forces us to question drug policy, its uses, and its effects on “normal” citizens.
Carroll uses her findings to explore what people who use drugs can teach us about the contemporary societies emerging in post-Soviet space. With examples of how MAT has been politicized, how drug use has been tied to ideas of “good” citizenship, and how vigilantism towards people who use drugs has occurred, Narkomania details the cultural and historical backstory of the situation in Ukraine. Carroll reveals how global efforts supporting MAT in Ukraine allow the ideas surrounding MAT, drug use, and HIV to resonate more broadly into international politics and echo into the heart of the Ukrainian public.
Jennifer J. Carroll, PhD, MPH, is a medical anthropologist, research scientist, and subject matter expert on substance use and public health interventions to prevent overdose. She is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Elon University.
Minority Inclusion and Exclusion in Soviet and Post-Communist Societies
2020-2021 Speaker Series
As we continue to struggle with issues of discrimination and systemic racism in our own country, it’s important to broaden our perspectives and examine the often-overlooked experiences of minorities and vulnerable communities living in Russia, Eurasia and Eastern Europe. Over the next couple of years, we have planned an academic speaker series that considers some of the latest academic research on issues of discrimination, representation, identity, and inequality in the USSR and post-socialist societies.
The series, organized by Postdoctoral Research Scholar Svetlana Borodina, will look at minorities and marginalized groups in the post-Soviet and post-socialist space—how they become folded into or erased from (post)socialist national projects. Speakers will engage with different national contexts and social groups to help the audience build a nuanced understanding of the wide spectrum of inclusion and exclusion measures practiced in Soviet and postsocialist societies. We will tackle the following questions:
What kinds of minority bodies and identities serve as tokens of national flourishing in (post)socialist societies?
How do marginalized people reclaim their right to participate in shaping their future and the future of their countries, more broadly?
What is unique about postsocialist discourses of diversity and inclusion and what global challenges do they respond to?
DECEMBER 1, 2020
Voices from the Soviet Edge: Southern Migrants in Leningrad and Moscow
Jeff Sahadeo, Associate Professor at the Institute of Europe, Russian, and Eurasian Studies, Carleton University
JANUARY 22, 2021
Mixed Messages: Mediating Native Belonging in Asian Russia
Kathryn E. Graber Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Central Eurasian Studies, Indiana University Bloomington
FEBRUARY 17, 2021
Narkomania: Drugs, HIV, and Citizenship in Ukraine
Jennifer J. Carroll, Assistant Professor of Anthropology, Elon University
MARCH 17, 2021
Post-Socialist Rehabilitations: Disability, Race, Gender and Sexuality and the Limits of National Belonging
Kateřina Kolářová, Assistant Professor of Cultural Studies, Charles University, Prague
APRIL 7, 2021
The War Between the Wars: The Turk, the Homosexual, and Temporal Condensation in Postsocialist Armenia
Tamar Shirinian, Postdoctoral Teaching Associate Department of Anthropology University of Tennessee Knoxville
