Past Event! Note: this event has already taken place.
“A Common Language, a Common Culture”? Producing Similarity, Difference, and Whiteness in Russia
March 12, 2025 at 4:00 PM to 5:30 PM
| Location: | 3112 Richcraft Hall |
Date: March 12th
Time: 4:00-5:30
Location: Richcraft Hall 3112
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Event Description:
Debates about migration often focus on difference, building walls and introducing quotas to limit migration. In this talk, I shift our focus to look at efforts to attract migrants. Russian President Vladimir Putin has justified Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine by insisting Russians and Ukrainians are one people, sharing a common language, culture, and religion. This is not the only way officials utilize references to a shared culture; they also beckon Russian compatriots from abroad to return to Russia, the world’s fourth largest migrant receiving country. I take the case of Ukrainian refugees and Old Believers from South America as two examples of groups promoted as culturally similar to Russians and, thus, the most deserving of state support. Drawing on media analysis and ethnographic fieldwork with migrants and officials on the Russia-China border, I demonstrate how debates about culture reproduce and mask racial distinctions in Russia, even when inviting so-called members of the diaspora to return.
About the Speaker:
Lauren Woodard is assistant professor of anthropology. Her research focuses on migration, processes of racialization, borders, settler colonialism, political anthropology, multiculturalism, liberalism, climate change, Russia and the former Soviet Union.
Based on 13 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Moscow and Vladivostok, her book project, “Ambiguous Inclusion: Transforming Migrants into Compatriots on Russia’s Border with China” (under advance contract with University of Toronto Press), examines how officials and migrants negotiate Russia’s migration and diaspora policies on Russia’s border with China.
Her research has been supported by the Kennan Institute Title VIII Research Fellowship, the Wenner-Gren Dissertation Fellowship, and Fulbright research grants to Russia and Kazakhstan, and published in Cultural Anthropology and The Political and Legal Anthropology Review. She has also conducted research on international development and water politics in Central Asia.
Prior to joining Syracuse, she was a postdoctoral associate in Russian, East European and Eurasian studies and a lecturer in anthropology at Yale University. Woodard earned a Ph.D. from the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 2019. (Syracuse University Bio)