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Individual Advanced Research Opportunities (IARO)

2009-2010 Fellows

IREX is pleased to announce the 2009-2010 Individual Advanced Research Opportunities fellowship recipients. These scholars were selected from a record number of applications, and represent all levels of academic and professional research.

Name: Renata Blumberg
Institutional Affiliation: University of Minnesota
Research Topic: Alternative Food Networks and Livelihoods in the Baltic States
Research Countries: Latvia, Lithuania
Abstract: Alternative food networks are gaining prominence as a new development strategy for depressed rural regions in the European Union (EU). In Western Europe, the growth of alternative food networks, spurred by reforms to the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy, has benefited farmers and rural economies, while supporting sustainable development. However, the relationship between alternative food networks and the revitalization of rural livelihoods remains largely unexamined in the new EU member states of Eastern Europe. Blumberg proposes to study existing alternative food networks in rural regions of Latvia and Lithuania, by examining how social inequalities, ethnic and gender based differences, and also spatial contexts, influence their emergence, structure and economic viability.

 

Name: Laryssa Chomiak
Institutional Affiliation: University of Maryland
Research Topic: Civic Politics in Ukraine: New Visions of Civil Society and Public Space
Research Countries: Ukraine
Abstract: This research seeks to understand the effects of Ukraine’s Orange Revolution on the development and evolution of the country’s civil society. Specifically, Chomiak is researching the ways in which the expansion of civil society is linked to the large-scale oppositional movement that formed under semi-authoritarian conditions prior to 2004. Theoretically, her dissertation challenges dominant theories of civil society in political science by identifying informal, public practices outside the organizational realm that are central to the development and dissemination of civic reforms. The scholar will rely on a mixture of qualitative methods, including interview research, participant observation and content analysis to address her questions. 

 

Name: Sarah Garding           
Institutional Affiliation: University of California - Berkeley
Research Topic: Remaking State-Diaspora Relations in Post-Communist Croatia, Serbia, and Ukraine
Research Countries: Serbia, Croatia, Ukraine
Abstract: This research looks at the transformation of state-diaspora relations in post communist Croatia, the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (later Serbia-Montenegro), and Ukraine. Specifically, Garding looks at variation in ruling elites’ willingness to strengthen state-diaspora ties, and variation in the institutions that they create as these relations are reconstituted. In each case, she examines changing state-diaspora relations in the late communist period, the political flux of the early 1990’s, and the period following electoral revolutions in the 2000s. Garding then looks at the impact of Croatian, Serbian, and Ukrainian diasporic transnationalism on homeland democratization, an area of research that has not been adequately addressed.

 

Name: Melissa Gayan
Institutional Affiliation: Emory University
Research Topic: First Crack of the Thaw: How the 1956 Tbilisi Protests Renegotiated Soviet Hegemony
Research Countries: Georgia, Russia
Abstract: The short Russian-Georgian war in the summer 2008 revealed that the question of Russian influence in its Caucasian borderland was just as important now as it was when the tsarist government arrived in the North Caucasus at the turn of the nineteenth century. This research project takes another moment of instability, the 1956 Tbilisi protests in the wake of Khrushchev’s “Secret Speech,” and analyzes the changes that these protests forced upon the center-periphery relationship between Moscow and Georgia. This new relationship profoundly altered questions of regional autonomy for the Georgian Soviet republic but did not end Georgian resistance to central control; there would be six more mass protests in Tbilisi and other Georgian cities from 1978 up until the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991. The dismantling of the Soviet Union, however, did not put an end to the issue of regional autonomy for Georgia and other Soviet Republics as post-Soviet governments were dominated by former Soviet apparatchiks which were nearly always Russia-oriented in their policies. Change did come, in the second decade of independence for these states, when the “Color Revolutions,” erupted into a series of mass protests in Georgia (Rose Revolution, 2003), Ukraine (Orange Revolution, begun in late 2004), and Kyrgyzstan (Tulip Revolution, 2005) which demonstrated how Russian authority was still a contested and sometimes explosive topic in many of the former Soviet borderlands.

 

Name: Shirley Gedeon
Institutional Affiliation: University of Vermont
Research Topic: The Role of Financial Systems in Monetary and Stabilization Policy Under the Currency Board Regime in Bosnia and Herzegovina
Research Countries: Bosnia and Herzegovina
Abstract: This study focuses on the role that financial markets and institutions play in shaping economic outcomes in Bosnia and Herzegovina under the currency board regime. It asks on what basis banks secure outside funding to support their loan portfolios, how the borrowed funds influence the size of the monetary base, and what the sequence of responses on the part of monetary authorities have been to contain the explosive growth in credit. It is especially interested in the feedback, or hysteresis, of decisions of banks to invest in BiH on the behavior of monetary authorities. 

 

Name: Liliya Karimova
Institutional Affiliation: University of Massachusetts - Amherst
Research Topic: Islamic Revival in the Post-Soviet Space: Tatar Muslim Women's Identities in the Central Russian Republic of Tatarstan
Research Countries: Russia
Abstract: In this project, Karimova explores the rise of Muslim religiosity among Tatar women in the central Russian Republic of Tatarstan. Focusing specifically on these women’s negotiation of ethnic and religious identities, she will address two fundamental questions: 1) what are the relations between Tatar ethnic and Islamic revival in Tatarstan; and 2) why do Tatar Muslim women choose Islam as a normal compass and source of agency despite the challenges the Islamic way of life presents? For centuries, Tatars have maintained ethnic identities based on language, culture, and religion that distinguish them from surrounding ethnic Russians. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, however, the Tatar ethnic revival has been accompanied by a grassroots Islamic revival that only partially overlaps with the ethnic revival. Utilizing ethnographic methods and discourse analysis, Karimova will examine the ways in which self-identified Tatar Muslim women negotiate their identities vis-à-vis Islam in the context of a post-Soviet Russian, predominantly Christian, state where they are both an ethnic and religious minority.

 

Name: Elizabeth King
Institutional Affiliation: University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill
Research Topic: HIV Risk among Marginalized Women in Serbia: Individual and Contextual Factors of Access to Prevention Services
Research Countries: Serbia
Abstract: The purpose of this research is to describe the experiences of female sex workers in accessing HIV testing services in Belgrade.  King will conduct in-depth interviews with female sex workers and a series of interviews and observations with HIV experts, prevention and treatment service providers, and NGO representatives. This formative ethnographic research will provide insights into how the social and institutional contexts of HIV services affect women’s experiences in Serbia. This research has important implications for designing interventions appropriate to the social and cultural contexts and future domestic and international policies on HIV prevention, testing and treatment services throughout the region.

 

Name: Natalie Koch
Institutional Affiliation: University of Colorado - Boulder
Research Topic: Nation-Building and Geopolitical Traditions in Post-Independence Kazakhstan
Research Countries: Kazakhstan
Abstract: The proposed case study of Kazakhstan, which is part of a larger dissertation research project, analyzes how nation-building has taken place differentially across its territory. Kazakhstan’s marked demographic, geographic and societal fissures make it an ideal site for this study. Employing mixed qualitative and quantitative methods, Koch examines the nature of large- and small- scale politics of identity construction in post-independence Kazakhstan’s nation-building process. It specifically addresses the character of religious identity construction and regionalism in contemporary Kazakhstan. Ultimately, this research will serve to elucidate region-specific geopolitical cultures, and how this plays out in the enactment of Kazakhstan’s geopolitics.

 

Name: Robert MacGregor
Institutional Affiliation: Princeton University
Research Topic: The Technological History of Soviet Rocket Engine Design
Research Countries: Russia
Abstract: The Soviet Union was the birthplace of many space “firsts” including the first manned satellite and the first man in space. MacGregor aim to analyze the emergence and evolution of the Soviet rocket industry from the acquisition of captured German V-2 personnel and equipment to the aftermath of the Cold War and the dispersion of Soviet rocket technology internationally. Providing a more complete view of Soviet rocket design will provide insight into Soviet scientific and technological management.

 

Name: Alexander Markovic
Institutional Affiliation: University of Illinois - Chicago
Research Topic: Performing Ethnicity: Identity Politics and Romani Musical Performance in southeastern Serbia
Research Countries: Serbia
Abstract: This ethnographic research explores the ways in which musical performances shape ethnic identities in Vranje, Serbia. This project investigates how interactions between Romani musicians and Serb celebrants at musical performances both reflect and construct relationships between the two ethnic communities. In focusing on the ways in which ethnicity is performed during performance events, Markovic’s research examines how musical performances provide forums for individuals to strategically deploy ethnic identities. In addition, this project asks how changing political and economic circumstances in Serbia have influenced musical practices and affected local ethnic relationships. By examining the link between cultural performances and identity politics, this research contributes to debates on the significance of ethnicity in shifting political and economic contexts.

 

Name: John Alan Mason
Institutional Affiliation: University of California – Santa Barbara
Research Topic: Mobilizing the Left: The Internationalist Countermovement and the Origins of the Moldovan Civil War
Research Countries: Moldova
Abstract: In the final years of perestroika, as the Soviet Union buckled under the strain of reforms from above, proliferating social movements mobilized Soviet citizens to participate in and wield influence over the momentous changes overtaking the country. In Soviet Moldova, a particularly bitter dispute arose over competing visions of a post-socialist future. A popular movement for Moldovan national minorities and many Moldovans that wished to remain a part of a post-socialist Soviet Union. This paper traces the origins of the 1991-1992 Moldovan civil war to the mass pro-Soviet counter movement that contested national revivalist discourse on the sovereign rights of national groups. Mason argues that not only did social movement leaders frame their goals as the defense of the Soviet nation, but that at the individual level, Moldovan citizens, largely from the Soviet working class, living in a cosmopolitan and ethnically heterogeneous world, were willing to respond to an appeal to a supranationalist Soviet patriotism based on a Soviet legacy of industrial accomplishments.

 

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