Author: Larisa Kangaspuro

Dr Larisa Kangaspuro  attended the online workshop “Punishment in Global Peripheries: Contemporary Changes and Historical Continuities”. The realities of peripheral countries have long been overlooked and, at best, reduced to sources of data. This scenario is not different in the Punishment and Society field. Though the number of comparative studies on punishment has increased since the 2000s, this scholarship has failed to integrate peripheral countries into the debate, concentrating in a small number of countries of the Global North. This workshop was a response to the historical Northern, Western-centric feature of criminology and the unequal relations of subordination and dependency which has shaped the production of knowledge in the field. It aimed to bring contemporary changes and historical continuities in punishment in peripheral countries into the centre of the discussion.

This workshop was co-hosted by the Global Criminal Justice Hub of the Oxford Centre for Criminology (United Kingdom) and the Programa Delito y Sociedad, Universidad Nacional del Litoral (Argentina).

Link to the workshop programme

22/06/2012

The Academy of Finland has awarded a grant to Judith Pallot for a project that has strong synergies with GULAGECHOES. It is entitled: “Yugoslavian “Penal Nationalism” and the Politics of Punishment in the Contemporary Western Balkans: Testing the Limits of the European Human Rights Regime in the EU’s Southeastern Neighbourhood”.  The project will employ two post-doctoral fellows; Dr Brendan Humphreys, a political historian,  who is well-known in the Aleksanteri Institute, and Dr Olga Kantokoski, a political sociologist,  who will migrate to the Aleksanteri from the Social Science Faculty. The ‘Balkans project’ starts on 1^st September 2021, but cooperation between the two projects began today with a joint meeting to identify common interests going forward.

During the course of the March and April, the GULAGECHOES team held two intensive off-site work sessions to code the interviews that the project had been able to complete since fieldwork began in earnest in the later autumn 2019. To date, and despite COVID-19 travel restrictions team members and sub-contracted researchers have been able to take over 100 interviews with former prisoners in Russia, Estonia, Georgia and Romania. This just under one half of all the interviews planned for the project, and which we hope to continue as COVID-19 restrictions begin to lift allowing the ‘home team’ to get into the field. The purpose of the two three-day workshops was to begin the process of coding the interviews taken in Russia. In earlier workshops we had all got to grips with Atlas.ti and had had refined the code groups and codes that a preliminary reading of interviews suggested would be productive answering the main research questions of the project,  as well as suggesting new categories.  Taking the work off-site focused attention at the task at hand and helped us to achieve what we set out to do, and more.

Dr Larisa Kangaspuro  attended the online conference «Thirty years later: the soviet legacy, its practices and discourses», organised by the Moscow School of Social and Economic Sciences (MSSES), the European University at St. Petersburg (EUSP), Group for the anthropology of post-socialism «Soyuz» of the American Anthropological Association and the New Literary Observer Publishing House (NLO). The first day was  included a section Ethnicity, «race» and migration. Presentations and discussion were enriched knowledge for our project.

Link to the conference programme

Three members of the GULAGECHOES team took part in a conference: Globalising Eastern Europe – New Perspectives on Transregional Entanglements that took place in Leipzig and online 20-24 April 2021.

The panel was entitled “Transregional entanglements of Crime and Punishment”. It gave members of the GULAGECHOES team to present some of their preliminary findings from the fieldwork that we have been able to undertake, despite COVID-19. Dr Costanza Curro gave a paper on her work on reform in the Georgina prison system: “Perspectives on the Europeanisation of Georgia’s penal system” and Dr Rustam Urinboyev presented the interviews he took with former Uzbek prisoners who served their sentences in Russian penitentiaries:  “Locked up in Russia: transnational prisoners’ social relationships within and across the prison walls”. These were put in the context of post-1989-1991 members of the former communist countries of international human rights organisations by Professor Bill Bowring of Birkbeck College, the University of London and the project leader, Professor Judith Pallot, who also organised the panel. Dr Sofiya Gavrilova of the IFL, Leipzig chaired and commentated.

The conference was organised by the British Association for Slavonic and East European Studies (BASEES) Regional Conference in conjunction with Leibniz Science Campus “Eastern Europe – Global Area” (EEGA)

The project Director taking part in the round table event of members of the EEGA-BASEES organising committee summing up a successful conference

On 30 November 2020, the postdoctoral researchers of the GULAGECHOES team attended a workshop organized by the ESSO-group (Social Psychologists studying Ethnic Relations at University of Helsinki), Helsinki Inequality Initiative (INEQ), and the Centre for Research on Ethnic Relations and Nationalism (CEREN) at the University of Helsinki, titled “Im­mig­ra­tion, ra­cism and na­tion­al­ism”. The workshop brought together scholars from social psychology, media and communication studies, sociology and political science to join in discussions on challenges of representing immigration, racism and nationalism. Presentations discussed rhetorical, visual, and affective dimensions of communicating these topics.

In addition to addressing the actual challenges of communication, the workshop was aimed to strengthen interdisciplinary dialogue and to take stock of recent theoretical and methodological developments. How can insights from different fields of study be mutually beneficial? How can we enhance interdisciplinary efforts to integrate different kinds of knowledge into multidimensional and nuanced understanding of these complex issues?

Link to workshop programme: https://www.helsinki.fi/en/ineq-helsinki-inequality-initiative/immigration-racism-and-nationalism

 

18^th November 2020

The Working Group for Social Sciences under the Finnish-Russian Commission for Scientific and Technological Cooperation (funded by the Academy of Finland) and Tampere University organised a webinar on ethno-political conflicts in Russia. Contemporary Russia has to deal with the legacy of Soviet state by reconfiguring inter-ethnic relations. This process opens a Pandora’s box of inter-ethnic tensions and conflicts. The search for solutions is complicated by numerous other social problems – inequality, inadequate institutions and international tensions. Will Russia be able to cope with these problems and what options look realistic in the contemporary situation? The team members of the GULAGECHOES project attended the webinar.

13^th November 2020

This webinar was organised between the Gulagechoes team and the research group headed by Federico Varese, Professor of Criminology, the University of Oxford, UK. Federico is a leading expert on the Russian mafia and author of several books and many articles dealing with the Vory-v-Zakone (the Russian mafia) including two monographs – The Russian Mafia (OUP, 2001) and Mafias on the Move (PUP, 2011) and his most recent Mafia Life. The seminar arose because of a recent article about the Russian Vory that Federico and Jakub Lonsky, University of Liverpool, had published about the resilience of the Russian Vory-v-Zakony who are strongly associated with the Soviet and Russian prison system. The webinar lasted two hours with both sides agreeing to continue cooperation in the future.

As part of the 11th Scientific and Practical Conference “Cultural Heritage: Integration of Resources in the Digital Environment” the Presidential Library in cooperation with the Federal Archival Agency, the Union of Russian Museums and the Russian Library Association held the round table discussion “Russia-Finland: pages of our shared history”. The round table discussion spotlighted the issues of history of relations between the Russian Empire and the Grand Duchy of Finland. Dr Larisa Kangaspuro gave the presentation “The Grand Duchy of Finland and “other” prison in the Russian Empire”.
The paper discusses how penal reforms conducted in the Grand Duchy of Finland were perceived from an imperial point of view in the transnational context. Comparison of socio-cultural differences in the perception of the law and the imprisonment of the empire and the autonomy will create new perspectives of understanding the contemporary context of the problem.

https://youtu.be/xvAqYa3LlJE

10am-6pm

The purpose of the Away Day was for the team to share the results of the fieldwork that they had undertaken during the summer and to discuss the pre-circulated draft articles under preparation for publication.

The reports by the team took place against the backdrop of the corona virus pandemic which has wreaked havoc with the project’s field work schedule.  Access to Russia to continue archival work on the gulag and for interviews in Russia and Georgia which had been planned had had to be cancelled because of travel restrictions and alternatives found.   It was what had been achieved by the alternatives pursued that was the focus of the first session. It was kicked off by a report by the PI on some interviews that had been conducted by a sub-contracted researcher in September in rural Leningrad oblast. The interviews had been taken with people who had served sentences in the late Soviet era and promise to provide intriguing insights into the experiences and treatment of members of a small rural community of hunters and foresters.

The temporary lifting of travel restrictions between Finland and Estonia provided the team with the opportunity of developing research in Estonia: Dr Mikhail Nakonechnyi was able to spend a few weeks in the Estonian State archive in Tartu where he found some rich materials about the establishment of the gulag after WWII right up to the end of the Soviet period.  He gave an outline of his main findings which provoked much questioning and discussion. Then Dr Olga Zeveleva gave a very full account of the interviews she and the PI had conducted with Russian speaking Estonians who had  recently been released from the Viru-Vanga prison in NE Estonia.  Both the archival materials and interviews in Estonia prove to be very important in filling in the gap in our knowledge of the Soviet prison in the last two decades of Soviet rule.

The first session which continued on after a lunch break that gave the team the opportunity  to have a look round Turku, was rounded off by Dr Costanza Curro who remains unable to get into the field on Georgia but has taken responsibility for supervising the field work of an on-shore researcher contracted to do the interviews for the project. She reported on these and was also able to report on work that she has initiated on the Roma as a group of transnational prisoners, outlining her ideas of how this can be taken forward once the travel restrictions are lifted. The second session was kicked off by Dr Larisa Kangaspuro who presented the draft of her article/book chapter of the ethnic dimension of Imperial Russia’s use of exile and katorga.  This took us to the end of the day, and the decision was made to continue the discussion of the draft articles at the following Tuesday  team meeting in the Aleksanteri, when we would also have a zoom discussion with Dr Rustam Urinboyev about his recent field trip to interview former Uzbek national incarcerated who had served sentences in Russian colonies. These duly took place bringing the Away Day and its extension to a successful conclusion.