Program Description

“Being Apart – Being a Part: Practices and Theories of Belonging” continues the summer school series “Societies and Cultures Torn Apart”, started in 2024. In the summer of 2025, participants in the second school are invited to focus on practices and theories of belonging in Eurasia. The goal is to discuss the various links, formations, and settings which helped individuals, groups, and institutions to create common contexts, shared experiences, and distributed agencies during the Soviet period and after the collapse of the USSR.

What are the experiential and conceptual options for crafting a satisfactory sense of belonging in situations where state borders are unstable, national histories are imagined, family configurations are flexible, and personal identities are fluid? How do people forge social ties and group loyalties in the face of powerful social conflicts that are reassembling society? How do they envision communities to which they belong now and those to which they belong no more? How are these choices made? How are these choices articulated, represented and symbolized? How are they justified?

More specifically, what vernacular theories of belonging and solidarity were used in the USSR and are used now to normalize relationships with variously scaled formations – be it a state, a nation, a community, or a family?

We invite graduate and advanced undergraduate students in social sciences and humanities, studying the USSR and its aftermath to discuss these and related problems together with leading academics in the field. The summer school will consist of a series of lectures and seminars, and will include workshops on academic writing and ethnographic fieldwork.