We have another Summer Adventure to share! This time we feature Dr. Dima Arzyutov and his European travels. Check out Dr. Arzyutov's story below and be sure to sign up for his course this Autumn - Slavic 3333: The Soviet Space Age (Online)!

Have a story to share? Contact Ernst.150@osu.edu for more info.

The summer of 2024 turned out to be quite busy with many travels, conferences, and meetings with colleagues. It began with a visit to Dartmouth College in late May, where I delivered a paper on my ongoing book project about the environmental and social history of Novaya Zemlya. Additionally, I gave a lecture to undergraduate students on my ethnographic research in the Indigenous religious revitalization in the Altai Republic in Siberia.

Shortly after, I flew across the ocean to Bodø, Norway, to attend the International Arctic Congress 2024, a major venue for Arctic social sciences. Scholars and policymakers from all over the Arctic gather every three years to discuss pressing issues in this transnational region, often considered a planetary barometer of climate change. At the conference, I co-chaired a panel on Siberian and Arctic voice- and soundscapes with Dr. Richard Fraser of UiT The Arctic University of Norway. The panel brought together many of our dear colleagues, and it was a pleasure to see so many familiar faces. In my paper, I explored the significance of noise and voice in old audio recordings among the Indigenous Nenets and Altai communities and metropolitan archivists and audio engineers who curate and digitize these recordings. The conference was rich with meetings that often extended late into the night and were always inspiring.

Soon, I had to trade the stunning northern landscapes of Norway for incredible Bordeaux in southwestern France, where the University of Bordeaux-Montaigne hosted the conference “The Indian Citizenship Act at 100: Indigenous Rights, Indigenous Futures.” This event brought together a large group of leading scholars from/working with Indigenous communities in North America and neighboring regions. Dr. Laura Siragusa from our department and I delivered talks about the Russian North and Siberia. In my paper, I focused on the meaning of Indigenous sovereignty on the archipelago of Novaya Zemlya in the Russian Arctic, a history marked by competitive colonization and tragic militarization, leading to the forced relocation of local hunting communities while nuclear bombs were being tested. The fantastic array of papers and enlightening conversations, along with the stunning architecture and food, made the conference very special. (Thank you, Professor Lionel Larré, as well as the University of Nebraska Press, Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, and the Obama Institute for Transnational American Studies, among other organizers!) When in such a historical place, one cannot miss the opportunity to visit local museums. Thanks to the curators of the Ethnographic Museum of the University of Bordeaux and my colleague Dr. Dima Oparin, I was able to visit the museum and work with its Siberian collections. (Yes, Siberian ethnographic collections can be found in many unexpected places worldwide!

The week in Bordeaux flew by, and soon I was heading to Istanbul, Turkey, where my colleagues from the UK and I organized a seminar with our Indigenous Siberian colleagues and friends. It was a week-long workshop under one roof, living in a villa and sharing meals together, reminiscent of the Indigenous nomadic camps in Siberia where I had spent many weeks and months in the recent past. Our Istanbul workshop aimed to digitally share the world’s largest audio archive of Indigenous Siberian recordings from the Pushkin House in Saint Petersburg. Every day brought memorable moments as we listened to old recordings together, deciphering the meanings of words and phrases, and recounting the stories of those recorded and those who collected the recordings. It was a deeply emotional experience, about which we have already started writing a collaborative article.

These travels and meetings made me realize how wonderful it would be to bring our students to such places to show them the "non-Russian" Russia beyond its national borders.