1. « Особенности диалекта и социолекта в творчестве Н. С. Лескова » [Dialect and Sociolect in the Wo... (42:02)

Date:
2019-04-15
Summary:
Colorful and vibrant language distinguishes the oeuvre of Nikolai Leskov, “the most Russian of Russian writers” in the assessment of D. S. Mirsky and many others. This presentation addresses the language of Leskov’s oeuvre from various perspectives: connections with Leskov’s biography, critical reception, and, with reference to Leskov’s“The Sealed Angel,” its principal features and dialectical inconsistencies. Ani Abrahamyan is a PhD student in Russian Literature at the Department of Slavic and East European Languages and Cultures. Her research focuses on nineteenth-century Russian literature and the work of Nikolai Leskov, especially the strengths and limitations in his embodiment of underrepresented and marginalized groups.

2. “Between Large Scale Infrastructures and Local Communities: Informal Roads as Agents of Change” (54:17)

Date:
2019-10-17
Summary:
Dr. Vera Kuklina, Research Professor, Department of Geography, George Washington University While the impact of large infrastructural projects on Siberia’s people and environment has increasingly been gaining attention, important issues related to local infrastructures are less known. Taking the Evenki village Vershina Khandy as an example, Vera Kuklina’s research explores the relationship between different scales of local indigenous communities, extractive industries, and the state. With the introduction of infrastructural development and new transportation technologies, some traditional routes are being used as a base for public road construction, while others are being replaced by new elements: geological clear-cuts, forestry roads, and service roads, and as such, are informally used by motorized vehicles. These informal roads continue to serve as mediators between the village and large-scale infrastructural projects (e.g., the Baikal-Amur Mainline during the Soviet period, and more recently the Power of Siberia gas pipeline construction). The analysis and observations in this talk are based on materials gathered during summer 2019 field work, which included interviews with local leaders, hunters, and fishermen; travelling by different transportation modes; and participation in local subsistence activities. Besides her post at GWU, Vera Kuklina is also Senior Research Associate at the V.B. Sochava Institute of Geography of the Siberian Branch of Russian Academy of Sciences. Her research interests include urbanization of indigenous people, traditional land use, socio-ecological systems, cultural geographies of infrastructure and remoteness.

3. "Environmental Challenges, Policies, and Grass-Roots Campaigns in Today's Russia" (1:26:38)

Date:
2019-02-15
Summary:
Visiting environmental journalist Angelina Davydova speaks about environmental problems and challenges in Russia, the policies to tackle them, and the civil society initiatives and movements that have grown to face them. Davydova is currently based at UC Davis as a Humphrey Fellow. She was a past Reuters Foundation fellow at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, Oxford University (2006) and head of the German-Russian Office of Environmental Information (www.rnei.de). Since 2008 Davydova has been an observer of the UN Climate negotiation process (UNFCCC) and regularly publishes her work in Russian and international media (including the Thomson Reuters Foundation, The Conversation, Open Democracy, and Science Magazine). Davydova is also the curator of a two-year media training program, “Water Stories,” which features stories dedicated to water issues in Central Asia.

4. "Russian Odysseys" Part 1 (14:37)

Date:
2019-09-25
Summary:
Stephen F. Cohen and Alexander Rabinowitch Reflect on Six (plus!) Decades of Scholarly and Personal Engagement with Russia Open Panel Discussion. Stephen Cohen and Alexander Rabinowitch interviewed by their wives: Katrina vanden Heuvel and Janet Rabinowitch.

5. "Russian Odysseys" Part 2 (1:12:53)

Date:
2019-09-25
Summary:
Stephen F. Cohen and Alexander Rabinowitch Reflect on Six (plus!) Decades of Scholarly and Personal Engagement with Russia Open Panel Discussion. Stephen Cohen and Alexander Rabinowitch interviewed by their wives: Katrina vanden Heuvel and Janet Rabinowitch.

6. “Show or Tell? Improving Agent Decision Making in a Tanzanian Mobile Money Field Experiment” and ... (1:50:43)

Date:
2019-04-05
Main contributors:
Parker, Chris
Summary:
Show or Tell? Improving Agent Decision Making in a Tanzanian Mobile Money Field Experiment: When workers make operational decisions, the firm's global knowledge and the worker's domain-specific knowledge complement each other. Oftentimes workers have the final decision-making power. Two key decisions a firm makes when designing systems to support these workers are: 1) what guidance to deliver, and 2) what kind of training (if any) to provide. We examine these choices in the context of mobile money platforms?systems that allow users in developing economies to deposit, transfer, and withdraw money using their mobile phones. Mobile money has grown quickly, but high stockout rates of currency persist due to sub-optimal inventory decisions made by contracted employees (called agents). In partnership with a Tanzanian mobile money operator, we perform a randomized controlled trial with 4,771 agents over eight weeks to examine how differing types of guidance and training impact the agents' inventory management. We find agents who are trained in person and receive an explicit, personalized, daily text message recommendation of how much electronic currency to stock are less likely to stock out. These agents are more likely to alter their electronic currency balance on a day (rebalance). In contrast, agents trained in person but who receive summary statistics of transaction volumes or agents who are notified about the program and not offered in-person training do not experience changes in stockouts or rebalances. We observe no evidence of learning or fatigue. Agent-level heterogeneity in the treatment effects shows that the agents who handle substantially more customer deposits than withdrawals benefit most from the intervention. || When Transparency Fails: Bias and Financial Incentives in Ridesharing Platforms: Passenger discrimination in transportation systems is a well-documented phenomenon. With the advent and success of ridesharing platforms, such as Lyft, Uber and Via, there has been hope that discrimination against under-represented minorities may be reduced. However, early evidence has suggested the existance of bias in ridesharing platforms. Several platforms responded by reducing operational transparency through the removal of information about the rider's gender and race from the ride request presented to drivers. However, following this change, bias may still manifest after a request is accepted, at which point the rider's picture is displayed, through driver cancelation. Our primary research question is to what extent a rider's gender, race, and perception of support for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) rights impact cancelation rates on ridesharing platforms. We investigate this through a large field experiment using a major ridesharing platform in North America. By manipulating rider names and profile pictures, we observe drivers' patterns of behavior in accepting and canceling rides. Our results confirm that bias at the ride request stage has been eliminated. However, at the cancelation stage, racial and LGBT biases are persistent, while biases related to gender appear to have been eliminated. We also explore whether dynamic pricing moderates (through increased pay to drivers) or exacerbates (by signaling that there are many riders, allowing drivers to be more selective) these biases. We find a moderating effect of peak pricing, with consistently lower biased behavior.

7. “Through the Wilds: Industrialism and River Life in the Siberian North” (1:10:08)

Date:
2019-10-17
Main contributors:
REEI, Russian Studies Workshop
Summary:
Craig Campbell, Associate Professor, Department of Anthropology, University of Texas at Austin.The Lower Tunguska—a tributary in Siberia that flows into the great Yenisei river—was identified several decades ago as a potential site for a massive hydroelectric dam. If the dam were to be built, it would dramatically transform the river and dislocate thousands of people who live in the flood zone. To this day the dam has not been built, as a result, an entire generation of villagers has had to learn to dwell in the suspended temporality of a deferred catastrophe. Regardless of the construction, drift, and crash of industrial projects, indigenous Evenkis in the area have maintained and adapted their traditional lifeways under dramatically different forms of government and social life. The indeterminacies of future of events—especially catastrophe and planned landscape transformation on grand industrial scales—challenge Evenkis to adapt in a chaotic world and call upon scholars to attend to the entanglements of hope, dread, and anticipation.Craig Campbell’s second book, Agitating Images: Photography Against History in Indigenous Siberiawas published by the University of Minnesota Press in the fall of 2014. He is currently working on the cultural history of an unbuilt hydro-electric dam in Central Siberia, the weird time of a shadow, re-mediations of socialist encounters, and the aesthetics of damaged, degraded, and manipulated photographs. Craig is a member several curatorial groups including Ethnographic Terminalia and Writing with Light, the later explores the persistent mattering of photography and photo-essays to cultural anthropology.

8. "Who are you wearing" with Professor Linda Pisano (27:58)

Date:
2019-02-20
Main contributors:
Pisano, Linda, Shanahan, James
Summary:
In the throes of awards season, commentary on celebrity fashion choices runs rampant. This week, Professor Linda Pisano, chair of the Theatre, Drama, and Contemporary Dance department, talks costume design, style trends, and how we can contextualize red carpet fashion.

9. «Красная декада в истории сотрудничеста русских и американских антропологов» [The Red Decade in ... (1:04:36)

Date:
2019-10-21
Main contributors:
reei
Summary:
This talk will focus on the scholarly activities of Julia Averkieva and Archie Phinney, anthropologists mentored by Franz Boas, the “father of modern anthropology” and a seminal figure in 20th century North American anthropology. While a Soviet exchange student at Columbia University in 1929-1931, Averkieva accompanied Boas in fieldwork among the Kwakiutl people of British Columbia. Phinney, a Nez Perce Indian, taught and conducted research at the Leningrad Academy of Sciences from 1932 to 1937, serving for many years as a field agent in the Bureau of Indian Affairs upon his return to the United States.

10. «Между игрой и реальностью: детские сверхъестественные верования в цифровую эпоху» [Between Play ... (1:12:06)

Date:
2019-04-19
Summary:
Folklorists and anthropologists have explored children's preoccupation with supernatural entities for decades, and the development of the internet has given rise to online video formats for supernatural practices that are popular among children in Russia and beyond. Drawing on ethnographic research in Russian children's summer camps and online digital ethnography, this talk addresses children's supernatural beliefs, play, and imagination. A doctoral candidate in anthropology at the European University in Saint Petersburg, Russia, Angelina Kozlovskaia has presented her research at conferences in Russia as well as India, Australia, Finland, Belgium, and Estonia. During Spring 2019 she is a visiting scholar with the Russian and East European Institute and the Russian Studies Workshop.