This event was held virtually as a Zoom webinar and streamed via YouTube Live.

Please join us for an event in the Minority Inclusion and Exclusion in Soviet and Post-Communist Societies Speaker Series, a discussion with Kateřina Kolářová, Assistant Professor of Cultural Studies at Charles University, Prague on the book project Post-Socialist Rehabilitations: Disability, Race, Gender and Sexuality and the Limits of National Belonging.

Post-socialist Rehabilitations: Disability, Race, Gender and Sexuality and the Limits of National Belonging interrogates affective economies of trans/national belonging and abandonment that reformulated the post-socialist citizenship vis-à-vis discourses of disability, race, gender and sexuality. Building off of a varied archive comprising cultural representations, popular media, public discourses as well as counter- discourses of feminist, queer, disabled, racialised communities, the book asks: how were the processes of social change, the ‘democratisation’ of society (subsequent to the regime change in 1989) predicated upon creating zones of abandonment and social death sanctioned both by state and liberal publics? The book politicizes the layered temporalities and relations among gender, sex, race, disability and nationality through the concept of capitalist rehabilitation discussing the integration of the (Czech) post-socialist national subject into global capitalism.

Kateřina Kolářová is Assistant Professor of Cultural Studies at Charles University, Prague. Her work is grounded in feminist cultural studies, and is located at the intersections of sexuality and gender, critical disability and race/ethnic studies. Building off of the post-colonial and indigenous critiques of conceptual colonialism of “assuming the other,” Kolářová’s research currently focuses around following questions: (1) Cultural formations of zones of abandonment and intersectional analyses; (2) Transnational feminisms and transnational pedagogies; (3) Global economies of disability and bio-social precarity. In addition to Post-Socialist Rehabilitations, she is completing a second book project, Biological Citizenship and Chronic Embodiments, the politics of HIV and AIDS in the Postsocialist Czech Republic.

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

Event Video