The War Between the Wars: The Turk, the Homosexual, and Temporal Condensation in Postsocialist Armenia

This event will be held virtually as a Zoom webinar and streamed via YouTube Live. There will be no in-person event.

Register here for the Zoom webinar, or tune in on 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 Tamar Shirinian, Postdoctoral Teaching Associate in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.

Tamar Shirinian received her B.A. in Gender and Women’s Studies from the University of California at Berkeley in 2007 and her Ph.D. in Cultural Anthropology, with a Certificate in Feminist Studies, from Duke University in 2016. She is currently a Postdoctoral Teaching Associate in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. Her current book project, Survival of a Perverse Nation: Queer Transformations in Postsocialist Armenia, investigates the widespread rhetorics of sexual and moral “perversion” in everyday life. Her work has been published in American Ethnologist, QED: Journal of GLBT World-making, PoLAR: The Political and Legal Anthropology Review, and lamda nordica. She has edited a special issue of Armenian Review entitled “Queering Armenian Studies,” which also includes an original research article by her. Her work has been translated in Armenian, Turkish, and Georgian.

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?