Researching Memory and Identity in Russia and Eastern Europe Interdisciplinary Methodologies

This book offers a collection of innovative methodological approaches to Memory Studies in Russia and Eastern Europe. Providing insights into the relationship between memory and identity, the twelve chapters provide multidisciplinary analysis of how history is used to reinforce, remould, and reinvent national and group identities. 

This analysis includes a strong emphasis on interrogating the role of the researcher and the impact of methodology, exploring the field’s most pressing challenges, such as the subjectivity of remembrance,  reception versus production of discourse, and the inclusion of marginal perspectives. 

By focussing on countries in which the past is highly politicised, including Serbia, Ukraine, Poland, Russia and the Baltic States, the volume also analyses the diverse – and often conflicting – ways in which historical narratives emerge from these states’ efforts to create new pasts that shape their respective visions of the future, with pressing ramifications across this region and beyond.

1 Memory Methods: An Introduction, Jade McGlynn and Oliver T Jones.- Part One: Subjectivity and the Ethics of Memory.- 2 How to Make Subjectivity Your Friend and Not Your Enemy: Reflections on Writing with and through the “Authorial Self’, Juliane Fürst.- 3 Unveiling the Researcher’s Self: Reflexive Notes on Ethnographic Engagements and Interdisciplinary Research Practices, Alina Jašina-Schäfer.- 4 Dark Heritage Research Methods: A Case Study from Contemporary Russia, Margaret Comer.- Part Two: Locating and Situating the Past.- 5 New Museums, New Challenges: Reflections on The Study of Online Museums in Central and Eastern Europe, Tadeusz Woytych.- 6 Uncommemorated Sites of Violence: From Topographical to Topological Research Methods, Roma Sendyka.- Part Three: Representation and Production of Cultural Memory.- 7 Recollections May Vary: Researching Perpetrators Accounts of the 1932-1933 Famine, Daria Mattingly.- 8 Memory Studies and the Analysis of Crossover Literature: Methodology and Case Study (Poland), Karoline Thaidigsmann.- 9 Beyond Analogy: Historical Framing Analysis of Russian Political Discourse, Jade McGlynn.- Part Four: Memory Reception and the Grassroots.- 10 Reception of Great Patriotic War Narratives: A Psychological Approach to Studying Collective Memory in Russia, Travis Frederick and Alin Coman.- 11 Beyond the State Agency: Anti-Communist Memory Work in Post-Miloševic Serbia, Jelena Ðureinovic.- 12 Prisoners of a Myth: Soviet PoWs and Putinist Memory Politics, Howard Amos.

Jade McGlynn is Director of the Monterey Trialogue Initiative at Middlebury Institute of International Studies. She completed her DPhil (Russian) at the University of Oxford, where she also worked as a lecturer. She frequently comments on Russia for the media. Her monograph, The Kremlin’s Memory Makers, will be published in 2022.

Oliver T. Jones did his DPhil in German & Russian at the University of Oxford. His research interests lie in comparative literature and memory studies. He previously studied in London, Berlin, St Petersburg and Moscow, and was a visiting fellow at the Davis Center for Russian & Eurasian Studies at Harvard.