Left Perspectives on Method I: Slavic Studies beyond Slavic Studies: Methodologies, Pedagogies, Political Contributions

Session Submission Type: Roundtable

Brief Description

This roundtable explores the pedagogical approaches, methodologies, and theoretical frameworks that allow scholarship in Slavic Studies to robustly engage with students, colleagues, and community members beyond the discipline. Such engagement efforts have historically been framed in terms of the need to recruit/retain students to save Slavic Studies from extinction. The roundtable instead considers how the field might accomplish the same task by expanding its epistemological, linguistic, and regional toolkit. Through shifting the question of the field’s relevance outside institutional parameters, panelists consider the ways in which Slavic Studies offers crucial resources to respond to some of the most pressing issues of our day. Participants will discuss the frameworks and entry points that inform their research, teaching, and activism. These include: fascism and anti-fascism; the politics, economics, and cultures of state socialism; imperialism and decolonization; internationalism; theories of world literature and film; the comparative literary endeavor; neoliberalism and (semi)peripheralization. In so doing, the roundtable showcases that Slavic Studies is in a unique position to contribute to urgent political conversations both in and beyond the academy.

Sub Unit

• Professional Development, Non-language Pedagogy, State-of-Field

Chair

• Marla K Zubel, Western Kentucky U

Roundtable Speakers

• Julia Alekseyeva, U of Pennsylvania

• Rossen Lilianov Djagalov, New York U

• Zachary Hicks, UC Berkeley

• Dominic Leppla, Independent Scholar

• Cate I. Reilly, Duke U