Author: Larisa Kangaspuro

The team members of the GULAGECHOES project have been busy working through interdisciplinary bodies of literature on ethnicity, race, prisons, historical perspectives on prison systems and their evolution in North America, Europe, Russia, Eastern and Central Europe. In order to find new ways of approaching this task, Olga Zeveleva attended a workshop “Speed up your literature review with IRIS.AI”, organised by the IRIS.AI team in collaboration with the University of Helsinki Library (16 January, 2020). The software, which University of Helsinki employees can access online using their university emails, automates searches across academic journals and allows researchers to create complex and hierarchical search queries based on their research questions and abstracts. So far, the programme only contains open access databases across all disciplines, but in the future the number of available journals and articles will grow. The programme has helped to expand the collection of papers the team members are building on in their work.

Link to IRIS.AI: https://iris.ai/

 

On 13-14 January 2020, the postdoctoral researchers of the GULAGECHOES team attended a workshop organized by Andrey Indukaev at the University of Helsinki, titled “Words and Actions. Political text mining”. The workshop provided an overview of methods social scientists and computer scientists have used to analyse large corpora of text data and images. Questions about how far computational linguistics and AI can take us, and how we can use them in a way that is driven by our research questions, are relevant to discussions among GULAGECHOES team members with regard to the large corpus of Gulag memoirs we are analysing.

Link to workshop programme: https://blogs.helsinki.fi/digital-russia-studies/2019/12/31/workshop-words-and-actions-political-text-mining-january-13-14/

 

The GULAGECHOES project was delighted to host an open lecture on December 10^th in the Aleksanteri Institute by Anastasia Burakova on the on NGO activism and its challenges in the Russian Federation today organised by Dr Larisa Kangaspuro.  The lecture was directly related to the project’s concerns with the human rights of prisoners confined in penal facilities in the Russian Federation. Anastasia Burakova is herself an activist in the NGO Open Society and its current chair in St Petersburg so she was able to give first-hand account of the impact of the legislation that specifically targets civil society organisations in Russia that have been recipients of international aid.  In the lecture, case study examples were used to illustrate the various tactics, legal and illegal, employed by the state to constrain NGO activities which stimulated many questions and comments from the audience.

BY DR LARISA KANGASPURO

ASEEES Annual Convention is the biggest annual international conference of Russian research area. Dr Larisa Kangaspuro was the organiser of the panel section “Towards a brighter future! Social and legal adaptation in Russia” comprising of leading experts from the Nordic countries, England and the United States.

Dr Larisa Kangaspuro worked in the archival section of the Museum of Russian Culture in San Francisco, November 9-16, 2019. The archival section of the museum has acquired unique historical materials, primarily related to the Russian post-revolutionary emigration, as well as pre-revolutionary Russia and the period of the civil war. Some authors of memoirs (mainly the memoirs of emigrants of the second wave and the correspondence of the 1920s-1930s) went through prisons of different regimes: the Red Army and White Army.

She also worked in the Bancroft Library on November 18-22, 2019. The Bancroft Library is the primary special collections library at the University of California, Berkeley. One of the largest and most heavily used libraries of manuscripts, rare books, and unique materials in the United States. For political reasons, it is not easy to find documents on the history of the peoples from the USSR in the Russian archives. Especially about repressive activities directed against them. In particular, the library contains archival materials on the history of Siberia. It is generally known that Siberia was a place of hard labor and exile, both in imperial Russia and later.

 

Professor Judith Pallot was a keynote speaker at the conference:

– 19^th November: Discrimination or Equality? Women Prisoners’ Rights in Russia

– 21^st November: Bordering Punishment in post-Soviet Russia: the uneven steps toward opening up Russia’s penal space since 1991

 

 

Professor Judith Pallot was a keynote speaker at the conference 8^th November: The Return of the Gulag? Continuities and Transformations in Punishment post-1989

Professor Judith Pallot was a keynote speaker at the conference 21^st October:  Inequalities in Punishment: Continuity and Change in Post-Communist Penal Systems. Conference: Persistence of Change?