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Memory, Power, and the Future of Slavic Studies: Reflections on the 2025 ASEEES Convention
By Lisa Walters, on 13 January 2026
By Alesia Mankouskaya, PhD candidate and PGTA at UCL SSEES
From November 20 to 23, 2025, the 57th Annual Convention of the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES) took place in Washington, DC. Bringing together scholars, cultural practitioners, and professionals from around the world, the convention served not only as a meeting ground for research exchange, but also as a barometer of ongoing shifts within the field. Longstanding debates about regional focus, scholarly responsibility, and the legacies of empire were not merely discussed but visibly reshaped in the structure and content of the program itself.
Global Responses to Population Ageing: Populism, Pronatalism, and the Politics of Care
By Lisa Walters, on 18 December 2025
Written by Harry Robinson, current UCL SSEES MA student (International Masters in Economy, State and Society)
On Wednesday 29 October, the UCL FRINGE centre hosted an event to celebrate the launch of Dr Anna Shadrina’s new book: The Babushka Phenomenon: Older Women and the Political Sociology of Ageing in Russia, published by UCL press. Dr Shadrina, a Political Sociologist at the University of Liverpool, was joined by Professor Karen Glaser, former director of the King’s College London Institute of Gerontology, and SSEES’s own Professor Alena Ledeneva, who moderated the subsequent discussion.
Researching Ambicoloniality: Theory, Method, Positionality
By Lisa Walters, on 16 December 2025
Written by Harry Robinson, current UCL SSEES MA student (International Masters in Economy, State and Society)
Marking the beginning of the new academic year, Dr Svitlana Biedarieva delivered a presentation to the PhD forum on Critical Area Studies within the framework of the PPV research group on her new book Ambicoloniality and War: The Ukrainian-Russian Case, published with Springer in 2024. The novel theory of ambicoloniality seeks to fill the gaps in current postcolonial and decolonial theoretical frameworks for analysis of the relationship between Ukraine and Russia with area specificity, attempting to rationalize and explain Russia’s invasion of and atrocities in Ukraine.
A week at the International Council for Central and East European Studies World Congress
By Lisa Walters, on 14 August 2025
By Alesia Mankouskaya, PhD candidate at UCL SSEES. Alesia is currently pursuing her PhD under the supervision of Professor Richard Butterwick-Pawlikowski.
Being a doctoral student at UCL SSEES brings many hidden advantages, and one of them was the opportunity to attend the largest international gathering of scholars simply by taking the tube and walking into the premises of the alma mater.
Held only once every five years, the ICCEES World Congress is the largest international forum for scholars focusing on Central, Eastern and Southeastern Europe, the Baltics, Russia, the Caucasus, and Central Asia. The previous Congress was held in Canada, and it felt like a homecoming of sorts, since the founding Congress took place there almost fifty years ago. With the general theme of ‘Bridging National and Global Perspectives’, the last World Congress was hosted by Concordia University and the Canadian Association of Slavists.
Bringing Nyugat to Life: A Student Exhibition at the SSEES Library
By Lisa Walters, on 1 May 2025
By Hayley Anderson. Hayley is a fourth-year European Social and Political Studies student and one of the Student Ambassadors at the UCL Europe Institute for 2024/25. With her specialism in Hungarian and History, she has focussed her research on the experiences and identities of communities in Eastern Slovakia and the wider Central East Europe region. She is also a Student Associate for the UCL Platform for Linguistic and Epistemic Justice (PLEJ)
As a student of Hungarian and History, SSEES’s library collection is one which I find myself using regularly. However, it wasn’t until we had a language class dedicated to exploring the Hungarian section of the library that I realised just how sprawling this collection is. In the course of an hour, we tracked a timeline of translated fiction and historical sources, frequently finding overlap with the literatures and cultures of the surrounding countries. But there was one section which particularly piqued our curiosity, the Nyugat literary journal. Of course, the bold advertisements and illustrations which adorn the pages of the paper were eye-catching and refreshing amongst a sea of text. But there was also something exemplified within this hundred-year-old journal that reflected our own multilingual experiences at SSEES.
Bringing actors back in: The key take-away from a symposium on crisis and institutional change
By Lisa Walters, on 27 March 2025
By Dr Elodie Douarin, Associate Professor in Economics and Gerhard Schnyder, Professor of International Management & Political Economy, Institute for International Management, Loughborough University London.
What do hurricane Katrina, a sovereign debt crisis in Greece, military coups, and credit crunches have in common? They all cause crises that may fundamentally challenge established institutional, economic and political orders. While the ‘permacrisis’ our world increasingly seems to be engulfed in is certainly no cause for joy, for social scientists interested in institutions, it offers an opportunity, because crises open up a window to observe the interplay between formal institutions (like laws and regulations) and informal institutions (like social norms and cultural values) and their joint response to stressing factors. It allows us therefore to better understand the relationship between two spheres of human activity that are too often presented as opposed or alternative orders.
An illustration of crises including a hurricane, financial crisis, coup d’etat, with global impact visuals.
Loving Like Aitmatov
By Lisa Walters, on 20 January 2025
Written by Ksenia Sizonova, PhD candidate, UCL SSEES
Aitmatov’s lines are music. They must be heard.
Their resonating waves carry the mystery of love and divine anxiety…’
M. Gapyrov [1]
Discourses about the Kyrgyz author Chyngyz Aitmatov’s legacy are often centered around his coining of the term ‘mankurt’ — an enslaved person deprived of their memory through torture. Originally described in the 1980 novel The Day Lasts More Than a Hundred Years, the word ‘mankurt’ has acquired a life of its own, prominently featuring in national identity debates not only in Kyrgyzstan and other Central Asian states but in many societies of the former Soviet Union [2].
Calin Georgescu: Romania’s latest Medical Populist
By Lisa Walters, on 3 December 2024
By Jack Dean, PhD candidate
With the first round of the election having been explored on the SSEES Research Blog, the question that stood out to me was “Who is Calin Georgescu?”. Whilst most discussions in the media thus far center around the pro-Russia stances offered, it is worth exploring the Georgescu’s rhetoric relating to conspiracies and healthcare. I argue that Calin Georgescu is the latest Romanian political actor to utilize medical populism in the years since the onset of the COVID-19 Pandemic and suggest that Georgescu represents the latest iteration of a post-Pandemic, post-fact norm for the country.