RIPSS Seminar: Dr Rebekah Plueckhahn on Mongolia & Dr Grazyna Zajdow on Transnational Anti-Fascism
Schedule
Fri Aug 23 2024 at 05:15 pm
Location
155 Arts West, University of Melbourne | Melbourne, VI
Advertisement
Dr Rebekah Plueckhahn, ‘Performance, Selfhood and Sovereignty – Knowledge, Custodianship and Contestations in Mongolia’This paper will discuss the intersections of performance, selfhood and regimes of custodianship and how these underpin incremental forms of sovereignty-making in contemporary Mongolia. Situated between two large powers, performance practice in Mongolia forms a contested space in which Mongolian-ness can be articulated. These articulations are significant given Mongolia’s positionality in relation to Russia and legacies of past socialist cultural policies. Mongolian musical performance practice and accompanying knowledge forms a rich resource, the custodianship of which is implicated within contestations over custodianship of mineral resources and land. By examining postsocialist performative practice among a group of Mongolian Altai Urianhai, this paper will query under what circumstances discourses surrounding legacies of knowledge colonisation relate to contemporary performance in Mongolia, asking how this implicates contemporary sovereignty-making amid recent national and international, geopolitical events.
Dr Rebekah Plueckhahn is an anthropologist and a Lecturer in Anthropology at the School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Melbourne. Her research explores the lived experiences of capitalist engagements, urban transformation, ownership and expansion, as well as intersubjective experiences of performance and social aesthetics as people attempt to bring good futures into being in the face of environmental and economic uncertainty. A key component of my research is examining the implications of sociality and relations in shaping peoples’ engagements with forms of ownership, custodianship and wider place-making within Mongolia. I have published on anthropologies of environmental stigma, performance, causality and fortune, capitalism in Mongolia, infrastructural inequalities, cynicism and the negotiation of urban relations of power. My book Shaping Urban Futures in Mongolia – Ulaanbaatar, Dynamic Ownership and Economic Flux (2020, UCL Press) examines how urban land is transformed by dynamic ownership within sites of urban transformation.
Dr Grazyna Zajdow, ‘Szymon Zajdow, International Brigadier: Understanding Transnational Anti-Fascist Experiences in the Interwar Period’
Szymon Zajdow (1915-2004) was born in German occupied Warsaw in what was still the Russian empire. He was brought up in a Warsaw that became capital of Poland, among the largest and most diverse Jewish population in Europe. At 14 he joined the youth wing of the illegal Polish communist party and then travelled across Europe to become one of the transnational players in the anti-fascist fight of the Spanish civil war in 1937.
The central argument of my thesis is that it is possible to understand some of the great upheavals of Europe from the early 1930s to 1945 through Szymon’s story. He did not become a public figure, neither politically or in other spheres, nor did he leave any published works. But there are enough traces to be able to follow and understand his journey. This dissertation will lie in the space between what Barbara Caine (in her Biography and History, 2019) suggests is biography and microhistory. His life illustrates both the ways that the wider forces of history and culture produced this individual, and in this way how his life mirrors, and is also produced by these forces.
This presentation will outline Szymon’s early life in particular, and Jewish life in general, in the Polish Second Republic of the interwar period. It will contextualise his life to give us an understanding of how structures and networks are made tangible by the individual lives that underscore them.
Hosted by the Faculty of Arts Research Initiative on Soviet and Post-Soviet Studies (RIPSS):
https://arts.unimelb.edu.au/school-of-historical-and-philosophical-studies/our-research/research-centres-hubs-and-groups/ripss
Advertisement
Where is it happening?
155 Arts West, University of Melbourne, Arts West, Medical Rd, Parkville VIC 3052, Australia,Melbourne, Victoria, AustraliaEvent Location & Nearby Stays: