MIREES students’ report on the 2013 ASN World Convention

On April 18-20 a group of MIREES students – Cécile Moore, Laura Valauskaite, Taras Fedirko and Peter Naderer – and MIREES faculty took part in the 18th Annual World Convention of the Association for the Study of Nationalities hosted by Columbia University’s Harriman Institute in New York City.
The ASN Convention is one of the largest interdisciplinary venues for scholars to present their research in over 140 panels on the Balkans, Central Europe and the Baltics, Russia,  Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova, Central Asia and Eurasia, the Caucasus, Turkey,  China, and Nationalism Studies. Our participation in the ASN, on equal terms with established scholars and PhD students, granted us an opportunity to gain valuable feedback about our research and for once become insiders in the scholarly academic world.
With the area-centered research profile of MIREES, the ASN convention turned out to be a scholarly venue suiting our research particularly well. Although the main focus of the Convention is on issues of nationality, ethnicity and identity, the recent history of former socialist states has created a strong association between these topics and the regions of South East and East Europe, Caucasus and Central Asia.
Therefore, the Convention had a variety of disciplinary, thematic and regional panels broad enough to become a place of meeting for scholars of disciplines as diverse as social history and business studies, political science and anthropology.