Pobrecit:a:s

Impact of Discrimination on Integration of Emigrants From the Aggressor Country (with Ivetta Sergeeva)

Following the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, up to one million Russians fled their homeland, marking the most significant brain drain since the Soviet Union’s collapse. While some host countries view the highly educated and politically active migrants as an asset, integrating nationals of the aggressor state has presented challenges. Many migrants face institutional restrictions aimed at sanctioning Russia, alongside varied experiences of discrimination from local populations. This study delves into the effect of discrimination on the assimilation intentions of Russian migrants, focusing on language learning as a key indicator. Laitin’s model of identity building suggests that migrants’ willingness to assimilate depends on the perceived benefits, including acceptance by the host society. Following the model, Sergeeva assumes that discrimination signals to migrants that the host country’s society does not accept them, making learning the local language a less rational choice.

Utilizing a cross-sectional panel survey, the study establishes a link between discrimination and integration, differentiating between the effects of discrimination experienced from local citizens and local institutions on language acquisition. Findings reveal that societal discrimination significantly dampens migrants’ willingness to learn local languages and diminishes their trust in and attachment to host societies, unlike institutional discrimination, which shows no such effect on language learning. These insights contribute to an understanding of the impact of nationality-based discrimination, highlighting the role of societal acceptance in the successful integration of political migrants.

This event will be hosted in person and virtually on Zoom. Register for the Zoom meeting here. Non-NYU affiliates must RSVP for in-person campus access.

Ivetta Sergeeva is a PhD candidate at the European University Institute in Florence. She specializes in political behavior, civil society, and Russian emigration. She is a co-founder and co-principal investigator of OutRush and ViolenceMonitor (a series of surveys on intimate partner violence in Russia). She also has eight years of experience supervising projects in civil society and human rights organizations in Russia. Website: www.ivettasergeeva.com. Email: ivetta.sergeeva@eui.eu.

Date: 29 April 2024 4:00 PM – 5:30 PM

Speaker: Ivetta Sergeeva

Location: Jordan Center, 19 University Place, New York

Source: Jordan Center for the Advanced Study of Russia (NYU)

Polina Kanis

Professoressa on the Pole

Thu 25 April — Sun 05 May

Professoressa on the Pole* is the result of Polina Kanis’ investigation into the perceptual transformation of the female body in Russia following the onset of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine and subsequent ideological shift within Russian society. As part of this investigation the artist trained as a pole dancer and worked at a strip club.

The exhibit includes photographs documenting Kanis’ three-month stint at a strip club, the club’s rules of conduct for strippers, and a video re-enactment of the artist’s stage performance. The project marks the latest chapter in Kanis’ ongoing research into the changing role of a female teacher in Soviet and post-Soviet Russia, where limitations imposed by the state can only be counter-balanced by imagination.

*Professoressa (Italian: female teacher) refers to the 1967 manifesto Letter to a Teacher (Letters a una Professoressa), which harshly criticizes the power structure and classism of the educational system in 1960s Italy.

location: Expo

price: €5, tickets for a performance of the CARTA ’24 festival give free admission

duration: 5h

extra info: wed – sun: 14:00 – 19:00, evening performances until 22:00

language: English

is part of: Festival CARTA

Source: De Singel (Belgium)

Nadya Tolokonnikova / Pussy Riot
RAGE
June 21–October 20, 2024

Opening: June 20, 7pm

OK Linz
OK-Platz 1
4020 Linz
Austria

www.ooekultur.at
Instagram / Facebook / TikTok

Nadya Tolokonnikova, an artist who is founder of the feminist collective Pussy Riot, has long been persecuted in Russia for her conceptual performances and artistic protest against the Putin regime. Her performance Punk Prayer in the Christ the Savior Cathedral in Moscow, recognized by The Guardian as one of the most important artworks of the twenty-first century, ended for her and her colleagues with imprisonment for “hooliganism motivated by religious hatred.”

OK LINZ is bringing Nadya Tolokonnikova’s art to the museum, presenting her haunting works dealing with resistance, repression, and patriarchy for the first time to the European public.

Tolokonnikova’s oeuvre encompasses objects, installations, and performative works in which she processes her traumatic experiences during her life under Putin. Out of a state of repression, she has developed a visual language that rebels against aesthetical and political realities: anarchic and radical, yet also moving and witty.

“Being from Russia brings me pain. Most of my life, even after 2 years imprisonment following my art protest, I chose to stay in Russia, even though I had plenty of opportunities to immigrate, I tried to change Russia, make it a country that I would be proud of—peaceful, prosperous, friendly, democratic, loving, a country that values human life, art and happiness. First with Voina Group, later with Pussy Riot, I’ve been in performance art since 2007, for 17 long years—years filled with joy of protest and comradery, harassment, arrests. I watched my friends being murdered and revolutions suffocating under Putin’s boot.“ —Nadya Tolokonnikova

An oversized blade hangs like a sword of Damocles over visitors to the OK. “Shiv” is the title, American prison slang for an improvised knife. It stands for the precarious situation of artists and activists in Russia who, like Tolokonnikova herself, live in constant fear of persecution by the Russian judiciary. The exhibition will spotlight a selection of Situatioinist actions by Pussy Riot. At the center is Tolokonnikova’s 2022 performance Putin’s Ashes in which she joined forces with twelve women from Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia who experienced repression and aggression at the hands of the Russian president to burn a portrait of Vladimir Putin in a desert, collecting the ashes in small bottles.

“This art is a weapon,” says Tolokonnikova of her works, analyzing and exploring in this way the role that her art and she herself can play in the context of international power structures.

Curators: Michaela Seiser / Julia Staudach

Source: e-flux mailing list, 22 April 2024

Akhmatova’s Orphans
International conference
Princeton University
3-5 May 2024

May 3

4:00 pm–5:00 pm. Location: Firestone Library

The Anatoly Naiman Papers. Visit to the Special Collections

Presentation by Thomas Keenan-Dormany, Slavic Librarian

5:00 pm–6:30 pm. Location: McCosh 50

Rock. Paper. Scissors (2023)

Documentary film screening

Q&A with the co-author Anna Narinskaya

7:00 pm

Reception at the Levings’ residence (Shuttle provided)

May 4

Location for all talks: 245 East Pyne

9:30 am

Breakfast at East Pyne

Session 1

10:00 am–12:00 pm

Veniamin Gushchin, Columbia University

Late Akhmatova and Philology: Intertextuality, Interpretive Communities, and Effective History

Evgeny Soshkin, Free University / Brīvā Universitāte (Latvia)

Akhmatova’s Dead Orphans: Toward the History of a Paradox

Gleb Morev, Independent researcher

Akhmatova and Brodsky

12:00 pm–1:00 pm

Lunch

1:00 pm–1:40 pm

Keynote speech

Roman Timenchik, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem / Princeton University

Akhmatova’s Orphans and the Literary Orbit of the 1960s

Session 2

2:00 pm–4:00 pm

Dmitry Bobyshev, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign [via Zoom]

On the so-called ‘Akhmatova’s Orphans’

Emily Lygo, University of Exeter

Dmitry Bobyshev’s Poetry of the Turn of the Century

Marco Sabbatini, University of Pisa

“Out of the Magic Choir”: Viktor Krivulin and the Leningrad Underground Poetry on Akhmatova and her Orphans

4:00 pm–4:30 pm

Coffee break

4:30–5:50 pm

Sofia Guerra, Princeton University

Anatoly Naiman’s Translations from Giacomo Leopardi

Benjamin Musachio, Princeton University

Estrada as a Fault Line: Akhmatova and Company vs. Evtushenko

6:00 pm–7:30 pm

Location: East Pyne 010

Akhmatova’s Orphans. Disassembly (2024)

Documentary film screening

Q&A with the director Yuri Leving

7:30 pm

Dinner

May 5

Location for all talks: 245 East Pyne

9:30 am

Breakfast at East Pyne

Session 1

10:00 am–12:00 pm

Maya Kucherskaya, Jordan Center, New York

Solo in a ‘Magic Choir’: The Case of Joseph Brodsky

Michael Meylac, Strasbourg University [via Zoom]

An Enchanting (!) Chorus (?): Different Poets of Dissimilar Fortunes

Alexander Dolinin, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Brodsky’s Poem “Darling, I left the house today…” in the Context of Poetic Tradition

12–1 pm

Lunch

1:00 pm–1:40 pm

Leningrad Poetic Circles of the 1960s Through the Camera Viewfinder

Roundtable devoted to photography of Boris Shwartzman, Mikhail Lemkhin and Lev Poliakov

Session 2

2:00 pm–4:00 pm

Polina Barskova, Berkeley University [sic!]

Depiction of Links and Ruptures of Time in Evgeny Rein’s Poetry

Oleg Lekmanov, Princeton University

On Evgeny Rein’s Poem “In the Pavlovsky Park”

Anna Narinskaya, Independent researcher, Berlin

The Orphans and Jews

4:00 pm–4:30 pm

Coffee break

Session 3

4:30 pm–6:45 pm

Translating Poetry of “Akhmatova’s Orphans” into English

An Open Workshop: Kathleen Mitchell-Fox, Emma George and Ilya Kaminsky, Princeton University

Lev Oborin, Berkeley University

Anatoly Naiman’s “Vegetation”: Towards Poetology of Branching

Maria Rubins, University College London

Is Brodsky a Poet for Our Time?

6:45 pm

Dinner

Organizing Committee:

Yuri Leving, Chair

Ekaterina Pravilova, Ilya Vinitsky and Michael Wachtel

Sponsored by REEES, PIIRS, and Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, Princeton University

Source: Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, Princeton University. Thanks to the Fabulous AM for the heads-up.

Johnny Depp and Oleg Sentsov

65ca717b4fdfa50aa57bdb0888dd72e8 — “Oleg Sentsov is a Ukrainian filmmaker. When Crimea was annexed by Russia, he became a prime target to make an example of it in order to stifle dissent. He’s been tortured and sentenced to 20 years in prison, but Oleg is not backing down.” Image and text courtesy of Represent and The Voice Project.

Hanukkah, Christmas, Kwanzaa, and New Year’s are just around the corner. This year, think about giving your friends and loved ones t-shirts, produced by The Voice Project, featuring the mug shots of Johnny Depp, Nadya Tolokonnikova, Peter Gabriel, Tom Morello, Ana Tijoux, and Alex Ebert.

This is their way of bringing attention to the plights of political prisoners around the world, including Ukrainian filmmaker Oleg Sentsov, now serving a twenty-year sentence in Siberia on trumped-up charges of “terrorism.”

I’ll definitely be buying the Johnny Depp t-shirt. Not only has Mr. Depp been one of my favorite actors ever since the days of 21 Jump Street, he has chosen to draw attention to Mr. Sentsov’s imprisonment.

artists-800x520 — Image courtesy of The Voice Project and The Kyiv Post

The Voice Project speaks up for those who speak out, for those imprisoned around the globe for having raised their voice in dissent. We have to support each other, no matter the distance, no matter the borders. You never know when you’ll need the same in return.

For singers Trần Vũ Anh Bình and Nûdem Durek, filmmaker Oleg Sentsov, writer Dawit Isaak and poet Ashraf Fayadh, these individuals have fought for change, used their voices to speak out, and are paying with their freedom and their lives. We owe it to them to speak up now on their behalf.

Source: Represent

Nadya Tolokonnikova: The Year in Review

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Nadya Tolokonnikova
The Year in Review, or, An Eternal Russian Winter in Solitary Confinement
December 29, 2015
Facebook

We rang in 2015 seeing Oleg Navalny sent off to a penal colony for three and a half years for the fact his brother was involved in politics.

Pyotr Pavlensky rang in 2015 by starting a bonfire on a Moscow quay.

“You spend the year the way you ring it in,” said Pavlensky as he left the Guelman Gallery, where we were seeing in 2015, and went off to an icy quay on the River Yauza to start a fire.

In November 2015, Petya pulled off the biggest art action of the year by torching the doors of the FSB. Pavlensky will greet the New Year in a cell at Butyrka remand prison.

In 2015 we found out you cannot only be imprisoned for political activism but also gunned down for it in the center of Moscow.

As 2015 ended, arrests in the Bolotnaya Square case continued. Anarchist Dmitry Buchenkov was arrested on December 3. The defense claims he was not at Bolotnaya Square on May 6, 2012.

Gallerist Guelman held a charity auction at his gallery in support of the Bolotnaya Square prisoners. The result was that the Guelman Gallery was no longer Guelman’s gallery. He was not forgiven by the powers that be for the auction, and the gallery was wrested away from him.

But the government also made humane decisions in 2015. After sentencing Vasilyeva to five years in prison, the court let her out on parole two months later.

In 2015, the government also destroyed embargoed produce, because they had no fucking clue what to do about falling oil prices. Russians were weaned off the notion of stability and tightened their belts as the Russian economic crisis made $400 a month a serious, substantial salary, as in the early noughties. In a number of Russian cities, the critical debts owed by municipal governments to fuel suppliers have led to stoppages of public transport, and electric companies have turned off the lights in the stairwells of apartment blocks.

The myth of stability has been destroyed, the state is the new punk, a rifle is a party, and everything is going to fucking hell in a hand basket. The New Year’s meal, by the way, will cost on average 5,790 rubles this year, which is 28% more than a year ago. So it is better to save money on December 31 and take a nap.

And, while you are sleeping, to dream of Pyotr Pavlensky, Oleg Navalny, and Bolotnaya Square political prisoner Alexei Gaskarov celebrating the New Year in their prison cells and pouring Duchesse, a domestic carbonated beverage, into recycled plastic instant mashed potato cups.

Amen.

Translated by the Russian Reader. Image of Duchesse soda bottles courtesy of Frutto

Nadya Tolokonnikova: There Is No “People”

Nadya Tolokonnikova
June 18, 2015

It is not for nothing they are so fond of the amorphous and faceless word narod, “the people.” There is no “people.” There is you and me, and that guy with the mustache, passing by on the street. “The people” smacks of prison camp standardization. They say “the people” so the individual feels like a tiny grain of sand, faceless and alone.

“We should not have got involved in this Ukrainian business . . . But generally I don’t like talking about politics,” my acquaintance from a small Russian town quietly whispers to me. Political miracles begin to occur when the belief she has a voice is born in my acquaintance, the belief in her own stance, which might differ from the majority’s position and still have the right to exist.

So that this belief does not emerge, she is told she is “the people.” But do something to make her realize she is not alone. Show her people who think like she does. Let her believe there is something besides atoms, separated and frightened by TV and mutual distrust, hidden in the cells of their nuclear families, and venting their anger and resentment within those families.

Source: Facebook

Images courtesy, via a Google image search, of the website Pereprava, where, unsurprisingly, the exact opposite sentiments are expressed.