44th Annual Convention in New Orleans or the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies.
Irina Ilina, Head of Center for Regional studies of HSE, and Carol Scott Leonard, Head of Department for regional studies of HSE, took part in one of the conference roundtable "Regions and Cities of the Russian Federation: Verifying and Networking Data".
Irina Ilina, Head of Center for Regional studies of HSE, and Carol Scott Leonard, Head of Department for regional studies of HSE, took part in one of the conference roundtable "Regions and Cities of the Russian Federation: Verifying and Networking Data".
The general theme of the convention is "Boundary, Barrier and Border Crossing".
Extraction from the official site:
"For most of us, the value of ASEEES in our professional lives stems from its interdisciplinarity. We might also be a member of AHA or APA or AAR or AFS or APSA or APS or MLA or ASA or AAA or any number of other alphabetical permutations. But we belong to ASEEES precisely because it pulls us out of our disciplinary silos, provides us with new perspectives on shared interests, and therefore shows us our work in a wholly new light. The 2012 convention theme of "Boundary, Barrier, and Border Crossings" encourages us to confront the space between the disciplines at the same time as it allows us to contemplate the meaning of boundaries within our own areas of expertise.
Such a confrontation is particularly timely for at least two reasons. Now, as the post-communist world has entered its third decade, we need to take stock of shifting borders, both geographic and cultural. We might consider how the various areas in our Slavic, East European and Eurasian worlds interact -- or don't -- with each other. And how does "our" world fit in with other areas, whether Western Europe, East and South Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and, yes, the United States. As we look at the space that has indeed been crossed, we will also notice how many boundaries remain intact, or how new barriers have grown up/been erected. Or we might think of the theme temporally as well as spatially. How have we weathered this giant step into the 21st century? What might a glance at the changing calendar open up to us about other turns of centuries, other shifts of regime, other developments of new or repackaged cultural productions? How about genre crossings? Or on a more theoretical path, how are "crossings" both like and unlike "transgressions"?"breaches"? "blendings"? "interpolations"? "interpenetrations"? Not to mention clashes and "antagonisms and irreconcilable differences"?
The second timely reason to address the issue of boundary crossing is, alas, financial: it relates to the very future of our organization and the "interdisciplinary discipline" that it represents. With resources tight and priorities elsewhere, now, more than ever, we must be prepared to articulate what makes us, and the ways in which we help understand the world, vital. I know how important it has been for me to move from a panel on religion to one on history to another on literature at an ASEEES ("formerly known as AAASS") convention. However, I need to be able to explain to others how the intellectual leap across time, space, methodology, not to mention topic enriches not only me, but my students, my readers, my colleagues, and my fellow citizens. If interdisciplinarity makes ASEEES special, how does that specialness manifest itself? This is a good time to take a look at ourselves and beyond. What about area studies in general? What does focus on the interstices and crossovers between disciplinary areas within a geographic area -- or the examination of geographic, political, economic, cultural areas within a single discipline -- bring us? Clearly a lot, or we wouldn't be members of ASEEES.
Although panel proposals need not be restricted to this topic, let us take the occasion of the 2012 ASEEES convention to focus even more sharply and to articulate even more clearly the issues surrounding and bridging barriers, boundaries, and borders of all sorts."