Cultural Producers in the Eurasia Region Facing the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Series of Online Seminars
Cultural institutions and individual cultural producers worldwide have been severely affected the Covid-19 pandemic. The post-Soviet countries are no exception: theatres and bookshops have had to close; artists and musicians have lost revenue. The severity of the crisis and responses to it by states and audiences have varied significantly across the region. Humboldt University’s Department of Slavic and Hungarian Studies proposes to organize a series of online seminars with cultural producers, cultural journalists and representatives of cultural institutions from post-Soviet space in order to discuss the short- and long-term effects of the pandemic on culture and differences between countries; to identify the most urgent needs of the cultural sector; and to exchange ideas on how best to build international solidarity and support culture both in the short and in the long term. The seminars will take place in Russian, in the form of two-hour Zoom sessions, and will be conceived, moderated, and organized by Maria Stepanova, a former Unseld Professor at the Department.
We propose to hold four such seminars between end of June and September 2020, structured as follows:
In session no. 1, a core group of six cultural journalists, critics, and scholars specializing in different cultural fields and representing/residing in different countries, will present brief synthetic overviews of the pandemic’s impact as well as broader structural developments in their respective areas of expertise. They will help identify participants for sessions no. 2 and 3, which will cover an even broader geographical array of speakers (5–7 each). These speakers will be asked to provide a cartography of cultural production in their countries and fields (session no. 2) and discuss existing attempts at building bridges across national borders in the region through festivals, prizes, etc (session no. 3), detailing in each case how the cultural landscape has been affected by the pandemic. Members of the core group of speakers from the first seminar will participate as listeners at sessions 2 and 3 and also work with the other participants outside of the seminar to produce brief synthetic reports with ideas on how to help cultural actors through the pandemic and beyond. These reports will be presented in session no. 4.
Financer
Sonstige internationale öffentliche Mittelgeber
Duration of project
Start date: 08/2020
End date: 12/2020
Research Areas
Literary Studies
Research Areas
Eurasian studies
