Essays

Essays are selected scholarly articles published without prior peer-review process.

Georgia: A much-repaired society

Georgian capital and several buildings that were important parts of the cultural heritage have been demolished in recent years. Repairing is both cross-cultural and culturally relative; it has similarities across the world and differences based on tradition and affordances. In this sense, the specificity of repair is not that it happens but rather that it highlights the values attached and its aesthetics and moral implications.

Essay by Francisco Martínez October 25, 2016

LGBT-Rights in post-conditionality Lithuania One Step Forward, One Step Back

Even though the EU’s conditionality per se did not make Lithuanian people more tolerant, it may have created the conditions for winning hearts and minds in the long run. Despite the fact that the majority of LGBT persons continue to hide their sexual or gender identity (in 2012, 81% did so at school and 55% at work), the problems they face are no longer invisible, and even backlash-like developments contribute to sparking a debate. On June 18, 2016 a march for LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender) rights, known as the Baltic Pride parade, took place in Lithuania’s capital, Vilnius.

Essay by Ausra Padskocimaite October 25, 2016

Translating “gender equality” Northwestern Russia meets the global gender equality agenda

The unsuccessful “translation” of “gender equality” into Russian reveals numerous difficulties and indicates that the realization of the transnational feminist agenda could meet with serious obstacles not only in the countries of the “Third World”, but also in some former “Second World” countries.

Essay by Yulia Gradskova May 12, 2015

Postcolonial post-Soviet trajectories and intersectional coalitions

The article considers the centrifugal trajectories of the postsocialist world in the direction of the secondary Europe and the global South as seen through the prism of gender relations and at the intersection of the postsocialist and the postcolonial. The author focuses on the importance and specificity of geopolitical positioning in postsocialist gendered discourses using Central Asia and the Caucasus as graphic examples.

Essay by Madina Tlostanova May 12, 2015

Conflict or convergence? Products of Origins An analysis of the Swedish case of Baltic Sea fish

Protected designation of origin (PDO) is a certification scheme that certifies products by their origin, and is one of several important tools to strengthen the competitiveness of rural areas, especially for small-scale food processing in rural and less-developed areas in Europe.

Essay by Madeleine Bonow January 27, 2014

Latvians in Guernsey An emerging translocal labor diaspora

The Channel Island of Guernsey was among the first places for Latvians to look for work abroad after the mid-1990s. Over time, an emerging culture of migration has developed on Guernsey among the Latvians.

Essay by Aija Lulle January 22, 2014

Feast in a time of plague the May Day celebrations of 1917–1918

For the celebrations of the First of May, 1917, all the buildings on the Palace Square, including the Winter Palace, were decorated for the first time with white drapes with red edgings and revolutionary slogans. Under the Bolsheviks, avant-garde artists assumed the right to develop art for the newly formed communist state, and the commission to decorate Petrograd for May Day 1918, was awarded to futurists.

Essay by Natalia Murray May 14, 2013

Vasily Grossman and Hrachya Kochar

There is a great deal that we do not yet know about Vasily Grossman’s life. The widely held belief that Grossman lived out his last years in poverty and isolation is probably mistaken.

Essay by Yury Bit-Yunan May 10, 2013

PUSSY RIOT: REFLECTIONS ON RECEPTIONS Some Questions Concerning Public Reactions in Russia to the Pussy Riot’s Intervention and Trial

Here it is suggested that the greatest crisis of social consensus that the Pussy Riot action produced, and the deepest collective anxiety that surfaced in the discussion, was the fear of the active and politically conscious woman, a woman who does not hesitate to use violence in claiming her subjectivity from the authority of the church, the family, the establishment, or the state. Concerning one principal issue, the public opinion was especially dramatically polarized, and that is what the three authors want to look closer at, namely, Pussy Riot’s feminist agenda.

Essay by Yulia Gradskova Irina Sandomirskaja Nadezda Petrusenko February 20, 2013

The land, the sea and the water in between On the liquefaction of culture

Even though the sea is characterized by its transgression of all borders, the founding of Sealand has shown that one can transform the sea into some sort of land, into Sea-Land. Because the sea is dislocated, one can set up a location. Because it is not the realm of defined territories, one can declare part of it as a territory and thereby align it with the land and the terrestrial idea of a state. But if one does, it is no longer “sea” in the strong sense of the word,1 but rather a symbolic aggradation of the sea — just sealand.

Essay by Sven Rücker June 27, 2012