“Being Apart – Being a Part: Practices and Theories of Belonging”: a Summer School for Graduate Students (Armenia, June 15-29, 2025)
Call for Applications: YCIE Summer School
Being Apart – Being a Part: Practices and Theories of Belonging
June 15–29, 2025 | Armenia
The Yerevan Center for International Education (YCIE) invites applications for the 2025 YCIE Summer School, “Being Apart – Being a Part: Practices and Theories of Belonging,” the second event in the series “Societies and Cultures Torn Apart,” launched in Armenia in June 2024.
The 2025 summer school will focus on practices and theories of belonging in Eurasia. Participants will discuss links, formations, and contexts that enabled individuals, groups, and institutions to create shared experiences and distributed agency during the Soviet period and after the USSR’s collapse.
What are the experiential and conceptual options for crafting a satisfactory sense of belonging in situations where state borders are unstable, national histories are imagined, family configurations are flexible, and personal identities are fluid? How do people forge social ties and group loyalties in the face of powerful social conflicts that are reassembling society? How do they envision communities to which they belong now and those to which they belong no more? How are these choices made? How are these choices articulated, represented and symbolized? How are they justified? More specifically, what vernacular theories of belonging and solidarity were used in the USSR and are used now to normalize relationships with variously scaled formations – be it a state, a nation, a community, or a family?
We invite graduate and advanced undergraduate students in social sciences and humanities, studying the USSR and its aftermath, to discuss these and related problems together with leading academics in the field. The summer school will consist of a series of lectures and seminars, and it will include workshops on academic writing and ethnographic fieldwork.
There will be four thematic clusters:
- Nations & States: Exploring how nations and states foster loyalty or alienation, the impact of memory politics, and the interplay of cosmopolitan aspirations with localized experiences.
- Cities: Examining the material and institutional affordances of Soviet and post-Soviet cities for creating attachments to spaces, networks, and urban life.
- Home & Family: Investigating family dynamics, cultural intimacy, and personal freedom in Soviet-style modernity and post-Soviet transformations.
- Affective Communities: Focusing on communities formed through shared emotional reactions, such as fandoms, performing collectives, or other affective networks.
Application Requirements
- A one-page cover letter outlining your interest in the summer school and relevant qualifications.
- A creative or research project addressing one of the cluster themes (e.g., a short essay, podcast, or curated archive).
- A CV.
- One letter of recommendation from an academic advisor.
Applications must be submitted via the form on our website: https://summerschool.yerevancenter.org
Priority deadline: January 20, 2025, by the end of the day. Applicants will receive notification of acceptance in February.
Financial Information
The program cost is $900, which includes room and board (two meals per day) and a limited number of excursions. Travel expenses are not included.
Financial assistance: Financial support in the form of a partial or full tuition waiver and/or a travel allowance is available for admitted students with demonstrated need. The level of support awarded will be dependent on the scale of requests we receive, given that our budget for support is not unlimited.
For questions or additional information, please contact us at:
summerschool★yerevancenter.org ★→@