International conference ‘Man in a Changing World. Identity and Social Adaptation: Past and Present. Methodology, Methods and Practice of Research’
On October 14–15, 2014, an international conference themed ‘Man in a Changing World. Identity and Social Adaptation: Past and Present. Methodology, Methods and Practice of Research’ was held at Tomsk State University organized jointly by the Laboratory for Social and Anthropological Research and the European Union Centre in Siberia.
Around 110 participants attended the conference, more than half of them coming from other Russian cities (Moscow, Saint Petersburg, Yekaterinburg, Nizhniy Novgorod, Perm, Omsk, Barnaul, Krasnoyarsk, Irkutsk, Novosibirsk, Tyumen, and Nizhniy Tagil) as well as from abroad (Sweden, UK, USA, Poland, Norway, Belgium, Kazakhstan, and Moldova).
TSU Vice-Rector for international affairs Artyom Yu. Rykun addressed the participants with a welcoming speech at the conference opening ceremony. Invited key speaker, professor of Princeton University Sergey Ushakin delivered a talk titled ‘From war to war: narratives of collapse as rituals of solidarity’ dedicated to the study of war songs related to the war in Afghanistan and Chechnya.
During the two days of the conference speakers and attendees participated in 13 sections on various topics. More details on the sections are available in brief descriptions thereof below (in Russian):
Section 1 ‘Modern identities and the way of life of the population of the North’
Section 2 ‘Multiculturalism: the right to difference or the absolutization of culture’
Section 3 ‘Migrants in a resettlement-based society: strategies and practices of integration’
Section 4 ‘Migrants and the host society’
Section 5 ‘Cities: practices, relationships, emotions’
Section 6 ‘Applied anthropological research’
Section 9 ‘Siberian regional identity: past and present’
Section 10 ‘Identities in Russia and Eastern Asia: a Eurasian legacy?’
Section 11 ‘Identification practices in science and education’
Section 12 ‘Archaeological heritage in the context of regional and ethnic identity’
Section 13 ‘Human behaviour: evolutionary and cross-cultural aspects’
The conference culminated in a round table discussion moderated by professor Dmitri A. Funk and professor Elena G. Trubina. Main topics for discussion were the possibilities and limitations of the use of the term ‘identity’ as a category of analysis and the difficulties that emerge in the organization of the discussion space in which researchers from different research fields are involved. The main positive result of the conference stressed by the majority of the conference participants was that it provided the opportunity of discussing a wide range of problems of clearly interdisciplinary nature.
Please see the conference programme and abstracts here (in Russian).
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The project "Man in a Changing World. Identity and Social Adaptation: Past and Present" is funded by the Russian Government 