The Soyuz Symposium, an intimate conference designed to connect contemporary scholars working the fields of socialism and post-socialism, was hosted by the Ellison Center on the final weekend of February 2015. This event brought together more than two-dozen scholars from numerous disciplines to share their work on the history, social politics, and lived experiences of socialism and post-socialism throughout the European, Central Asian, and East Asian regions. The theme of this year’s Symposium was “Shifting Territories: Historical Legacies and Social Change.” Conference participants tackled these concepts by presenting their research in six panels over a period of two days.

On Research, Relationships and Other Contradictions from the Field by Jennifer Carroll “The very existence of my research site is unethical … My university Institutional Review Board (IRB) did not prepare me for any of this.” –Jonathan Stillo, “Research Ethics in Impossibly Unethical Situations” (posted 21-Dec-2011 on the cac.ophony.org weblog) Recently, someone commented that my

By Laura A. Dean Čaka iela, a main street running through the Latvian capital of Riga, was named for the famous Latvian writer Aleksanders Čaks, but in the post-communist period it has become synonymous with something more sinister. I first crossed this street in 1999, while studying abroad at the University of Latvia through my