April 14, 2022
12.30 pm – 1.30 pm (PST)
The Centre for European Studies is co-sponsoring a virtual Sawchen Lecture, featuring Dr. Kathryn Graber of Indiana University.
This talk is also co-sponsored by the Eurasia Research Cluster and the Department of Anthropology, UBC.
Register here via Zoom: https://ubc.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_X0EcQmKgQTWxGBESIMKUfA
Title: “Mixed Messages: Mediating Native Belonging in Asian Russia”
Abstract: Focusing on language and media in eastern Siberia, Mixed Messages (Cornell University Press, 2020) engages debates about the role of minority media in society, alternative visions of modernity, and the impact of media on everyday language use. The book demonstrates that language and the production, circulation, and consumption of media are practices by which residents of the region perform and negotiate competing possible identities. What languages should be used in newspapers, magazines, or radio and television broadcasts, and by whom? What kinds of publics are and are not possible through media? How exactly do discourses move into, out of, and through the media to affect everyday social practices? In this book talk, Kathryn Graber will address these questions through her ethnography of the Russian Federation’s Buryat territories, a multilingual and multiethnic region on the Mongolian border with a complex relationship to both Europe and Asia.
Bio: Kathryn E. Graber is associate professor of Anthropology and Central Eurasian Studies at Indiana University Bloomington. A linguistic and sociocultural anthropologist, she researches minority language politics, multilingualism, mass media, materiality, and intellectual property in Russia and Mongolia. She is the author of Mixed Messages: Mediating Native Belonging in Asian Russia (Cornell University Press, 2020) and co-editor of Storytelling as Narrative Practice: Ethnographic Approaches to the Tales We Tell (Brill, 2019). Dr. Graber’s research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the US Department of Education, and the Social Science Research Council, among others. She is also an award-winning teacher.