Cassandra Hartblay
Masters Candidate, Predoctoral Student
Department of Anthropology
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
2011 SDS Presentation Summary and Useful Terms List
Title:
Horizons of possibility: ethnographic insights into parent-activist strategies in
contemporary Russia
Abstract:
Petrozavodsk, a Russian city of roughly 300,000 near the Finnish border, was
closed to foreigners for much of the Soviet era. Now a vibrantly advancing
community, in 2006 the regional administration became the first in the Russian
Federation to respond to lobbying to enforce federal laws regarding the right of
all children to publicly funded education. During fieldwork in the summer of
2010, I interviewed and conducted participant observation with informants
including parents and relatives of children with disabilities, teachers of children
with disabilities, young adults with disabilities, advocates and non-profit workers
serving this population, and legal and social service professionals in Petrozavodsk.
I observed three divergent strategies that parent-activists deployed toward
increasing visibility and inclusion of children with disabilities in the city, each
marked by different concepts of personhood, citizenship, and rights. Amongst the
activists interviewed, (1) some parents remained bound to local and familial
strategies and dependent on state-funded income supplements to care for
children; (2) other parents banded together with educators to appeal to
benefactors abroad and, through small grants and mentoring partnerships,
created independent schools to aid in care for children and also increase visibility
of these children in the local community; (3) a final group partnered with civil
rights attorneys to lobby local government to provide funds that would enable
public schools in the region to enact constitutional policy and provide inclusive
education. All three groups credited international mentoring networks with
helping to develop workable local strategies, but each group engaged differently
with local and national institutions. This paper engages conversations about
global disability advocacy movements by providing a case study from the second
world, and speaks to questions from Russian studies about citizenship in the New
Russia.
Key words: disability, Russia, inclusive education, social movements, civil society,
globalization, grassroots activism, motherhood
Jargon and other specialized terms:
Ethnographic research – This term references a particular way of researching and
learning about human communities that is key to Cultural Anthropology as a
discipline. It is a kind of qualitative research, meaning that it is based on
experience and interpretation, rather than on quantitative, or statistical,
measures. An ethnographer conducts long, open-form interviews with human
research subjects, spends time getting to know the people and the place she or
he is studying, and often participates in the daily life of the community.
Ethnographic research results in written accounts, or ethnographies, that attempt
to describe or translate the experiences of the community being studied to
people outside of that community.
Postsoviet Russia – The phrase postsoviet underlines the particular cultural
formation that follows the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. The Soviet Union
was an enormous political entity, with territories spanning the European
continents, from the Japanese borders in the East, into Central and Northern
Europe in the West, and from the North Sea in the polar North to much of Central
Asia in the South. Centered in Moscow, the Soviet Union was born out of the
1917 Russian revolution, with the goal of building a people’s republic that strove
for a communist future that glorified a technologically advanced industrial labor
force, the working citizen, and the collective good. Following the cruelties of
Stalinist repression in the 1930s, instability of the centrally planned economy
throughout the 20th century, brutal loses in World War II, isolation and stagnation
during the Cold War, and the upset of democratic reforms in the 1980s, the Soviet
Union collapsed, splitting into numerous separate states, the largest and most
prominent of which is the Russian Federation. The regions of the former Soviet
Union (the so-called ‘second world’) share a set of historical factors (including the
transition in the 1990s to market economies and democracy, a Moscow-centered
universe, Russian as the lingua franca, the aftermath of complete political
revolution, and a memory of living socialism) that set them apart from either the
West or the Global South.
Grassroots movement – I use this term to emphasize a home grown political
movement, undertaken by common citizens, responding to local problems by
looking for viable solutions at local, regional, national and international levels. For
example, the parents in Petrozavodsk, Russia are only looking to solve the
problems that they are facing, not to make changes on the national scale. This is
particularly in contrast to a lot of politics about “rights” that include professional
lobbying on a national and international level.
Transition discourses – A term used by anthropologists of postsoviet Europe to
describe the way that news media, politicians, and many political scientists and
economists tend to talk about the changes that have occurred in that region since
the end of the Soviet Union. Anthropologists use this phrase to emphasize the
fact that by focusing on a “transition” from socialism to capitalism, and Soviet
autocracy to democracy, much of what is happening on the ground has been
missed, obscured by these binaries (see for example: Lemon 2008, Yurchak 2006,
Caldwell 2004).
Global assemblages and deterritorialized localities – academic phrases derived
from the work of Deleuze and Guattari (1972), that emphasize a manner of
understanding the world that tries to get around the tendency to consider the
most powerful ideas and regions to be the most relevant or real. For example, to
think about the way that Malaysian factory workers see their daily work as being
equally important and equally correct as the way that the American corporation
that owns the factory sees their daily work (Ong 1988; 2005).
Diverse economies – An idea put forth by the authorial duo J.K. Gibson-Graham,
that, instead of always looking to the hegemony of market capitalism to explain
socio-political phenomena, scholars ought to attend to the ways that
noncapitalist practices (including collectivist practices, barter economies,
educational investments, etc.) make up much of our economic lives. In the
context of this paper, the idea also challenges us to look beyond the binary of
socialism/capitalism.
Proper Nouns:
Petrozavodsk – A city in Northwestern Russia. The name is a combination of
Russian words meaning “factory of Peter”, in honor of Peter the Great (19th
century Tsar), who established the city as an ammunition factory to supply his
Saint Petersburg based Navy. The city is now the capital of the region of Karelia.
Karelia – A region of the Russian Federation, north of Saint Petersburg, that
borders Finland. The land is distinguished by great swaths of forest and many
lakes that remain largely undeveloped, with scattered villages and small cities.
Historically the territory has changed hands between Russian and Finnish rule,
with a mixed ethnic heritage. Today, Karelia is a political administrative region of
the Russian Federation (like an American state) that is known for its progressive
government, developing economy, and close cultural and geographic ties to
Northern Europe.
Internati – The Russian word for residential rehabilitation centers where children
with special needs have historically been sent. The quality of life and services of
internati varied tremendously, and were largely dependent on the vision and
leadership of the local director. Some internati have, in the past 20 years, worked
to update their rehabilitative models with the best international practices; others
remain little more than near orphanages that feed, cloth, and minimally entertain
toddler through 18 year old Russians who are not expected to ever join their
communities. During the Soviet era, parents were strongly advised to leave
children with disabilities in internati and only visit occasionally, if at all. Many
parents today look for other solutions or compromises, like going to stay at
internati seasonally or building more localized schools and rehab centers so that
children can live at home with their families and still receive services.
Names:
Katya, Nina, Sveta, Lilya, Oleg, Nastya – Russian first names that I use in telling
the stories of the community that I researched in Petrozavodsk. These are not the
real names of the people that I talked to (I have changed their names to other
common names to protect their privacy).
David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder – disability studies scholars
Tom Shakespeare – a disability studies scholar
Aihwa Ong – a critical cultural anthropologist
J.K. Gibson-Graham – a pen name shared by feminist economic geographers Julie
Graham and Katherine Gibson