Past Event

Date: Friday, March 14th

Time: 11:30am to 1:00pm

Location: 4040 Nicol, Carleton University

Registration is required, please register here. This is a hybrid event. Online attendees will receive the event’s zoom link one day before.

Event Description:

Russia is the world’s fourth top migration destination. While most migrate to Russia from other post-Soviet countries, a small but highly visible group of the Russian-speaking diaspora has migrated from the so-called “West,” Europe and North America. Lauded in Russian media as “ideological migrants,” the Kremlin claims that they flee liberalism and oppression by the transnational elite. This presentation asks, what really motivates their migration? How do these so-called “ideological migrants” explain their decision to migrate to Russia, and what are their experiences once they are there? Drawing on ethnographic encounters with some of these migrants in Russia and the United States since 2016, I argue that we can understand these migrants as engaging in a form of moral migration, an ethical attempt to align one’s values with where one lives. In this case, migration is motivated not by aspiration for a morally “good life” but driven by political disillusionment. Attention to moral migration has implications beyond Russia, including for understanding political polarization and migration activism, among other topics.

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)