American Association for the Advancement
of Slavic Studies

Dorothy Atkinson
Executive Director, AAASS

Communications Technology

Modern advances in communication technology have helped enormously to strengthen ties among national organizations of scholars in Slavic studies around the globe. To take just one highly visible example, the newsletter of the international Council for Central and East European Studies (ICCEES) used to be produced at various European universities. The publication was then shipped to all of the member organizations of ICCEES, and distributed by each of those national organizations to their own members. In our case, the newsletters arrived by slow freight, several months after publication. We had to deal with customs brokers, and arrange for delivery of the cartons to our office. Then we would mail out the newsletters individually to our members. By that time it was old news at high cost.

Now we get the text electronically from the editor, and print and distribute it as part of our own newsletter (as a discrete insert on colored paper to maintain its separate identity). The information is timely, and the cost (which is deducted from our annual dues) is far lower.

The new technology has made it possible to break out of the Eurocentrism that previously marked the “International” organization. The recently appointed editor and editorial office of ICCEES are now at the University of Melbourne in Australia, while Finland houses the administrative office.

Interregional Organizational Linkages

The AAASS currently has over 400 individual foreign members and about the same number of additional foreign subscribers (primarily libraries) to our quarterly journal, the Slavic Review. Approximately a third of the foreign members and a tenth of foreign subscribers are Canadian; the next largest group is of Germans, and the rest are scattered around the globe. Due to the political history of the area (and to more recent factors discussed below), relatively few of our foreign members/subscribers are from the area we study, i.e., from Eastern Europe or from the countries of the former Soviet Union.

In an effort to strengthen contacts with scholars in our field who work in non-European regions of the globe, the AAASS has held several of its annual meetings over the past decade at sites chosen specifically to encourage the attendance of foreign colleagues. Our most successful meetings in this respect were held in Honolulu, and led to a significant level of participation on the part of Slavists from all over the Asian Pacific region. Our contacts through ICCSEES with area studies associations in the region facilitated our ability to disseminate information about our meetings and to issue invitations.

However, a meeting held in Miami to help create ties with Latin American colleagues proved less rewarding. We were able to obtain funds to assist scholars south of the border with travel expenses, but we had great difficulty locating appropriate candidates. The lack of comparable area studies organizations (there are none from Latin America in ICCEES) made it necessary to contact identifiable scholars individually; and the problems encountered in attempting to use postal, phone, and fax facilities were formidable.

National Council of Area Studies Associations

The National Council of Area Studies Associations, organized by the AAASS in 1987, has pursued a similar approach in reaching out to foreign colleagues. NCASA (which includes the African Studies Association, the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies, the Association of Asian Studies, the Latin American Studies Association, and the Middle East Studies Association) has held meetings with scholarly counterparts over the past several years in Canada and in Latin America. It is currently planning to convene another such conference in Japan next spring.

On the whole these meetings have been highly useful in acquainting the participants about the work being done by their foreign colleagues and in establishing channels for ongoing communication and collaboration. Mechanisms that have been employed for this purpose include joint memberships and/or subscriptions, courtesy registration rates, and similar incentives to encourage closer interactions. The endeavor has been most fruitful where area studies associations already exist in the region; networking without nets is awkward at best. But one result of the NCASA meetings has been to provide an impetus for the organization of similar councils abroad.

Relations with the Area We Study

The “internationalization of knowledge” has a special dimension for learned societies focused on international or area studies. There is a considerable difference between the pursuit of disciplinary studies across national and geographical boundaries, and multidisciplinary studies of a specific area or region of the globe, particularly when “internationalization” involves contacts with scholarly organizations within that area. The peculiarities of the situation are complicated in the case of Slavic studies by the radical changes — political, social, economic, cultural. and institutional — sweeping over the area of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union in recent years.

There is a tremendous and quite new diversity to be dealt with. Opportunities for scholarly collaboration are very different in, say, the Czech Republic and Tajikistan. There are new “sub-areas” demanding attention and countless subsets of each of these, all posing new challenges to our scholars as well as to theirs. Where once we had specialists on Yugoslavia, now we need expertise (and language competence) on Albanians, Bosnians, Croatians, Macedonians, Serbs, Slovenes, etc. Where once we studied the U.S.S.R. (and Russian), we now confront 15 Newly Independent States with their own variants of linguistic imperialism. Former students of the old monolith are now obliged to delve into the detritus of its disintegration.

It has never been easy to pursue on-site research in the area: lack of access to sources, rude living conditions, official xenophobia, all made such work a test of character. But recent developments created new and exhilarating prospects. Archives have been opening up, problems with visas are minimal, scholars in the area meet with visiting foreigners openly and speak freely. It is much easier for such scholars to publish abroad, and our own journal, the Slavic Review, has published a number of articles contributed from the area. Nowadays you can (for a price) make photocopies and get through customs with them, find food and necessities in the shops, choose your own (very pricey) hotel — or even stay with friends.

Yet the opening of the area to our scholars, exciting as it is, has not been an unmixed blessing. It has become physically dangerous to work in some places. Yugoslavia is off limits. In Moscow, crime in the streets, taxi muggings and murders, insecurity of person and property are new challenges faced by visiting as well as resident scholars. (Our newsletter just published a piece on self-defense submitted by a recently returned researcher.)

The current state of affairs affects the prospects for collaboration in many ways. The history of one of our own Association’s collaborative projects is a good illustration. A few years ago we were able to take advantage of the liberalizing climate of glasnost under Gorbachev to work out an agreement with an institute in the Soviet Academy of Sciences to produce a directory of scholars working in institutes of the SAS and specializing in Slavic studies.

Information on Soviet scholars has always been hard or impossible to find. There were no generally available phone books (not to mention the lack of phones), no up-to-date directories of those working in universities or research institutes. So our modest project was a break through of sorts. The staff of the Soviet institute was to collect and compile the information; we were to edit, publish, and distribute it.

But no sooner had the work begun than the Soviet Union fell apart, as did relations between the central Russian Academy of Sciences and the former branch Academies of the other republics. We were obliged to limit the scope of the directory to Russian institutes, hoping to include the other states in a later stage of the project. The Russian section was completed; but the rest of the project remains on hold.

A great deal has been put on hold during this period of massive institutional change, but a whole host of new relationships has developed between individual schools and consortia in the United States and academic (or academically oriented) structures in the Newly Independent States. Some of these relationships will probably not survive long, but they are providing new opportunities for contacts and exchanges.

The AAASS is not directly involved in exchange programs, but organizations such as IREX and the Joint Committees on Eastern Europe (ACLS) and on the Soviet Successor States (SSRC) are playing an important part in helping to promote and facilitate cooperation between the American community of Slavic specialists and their counterparts within the area itself.

As opportunities have emerged for new types of work in and for the benefit of the area (e.g., social programs, business training and management, the practical work of restructuring governments, privatization, the installation of communications systems, etc.), and as public and private funds have flowed into such needed programs, the sources of funding for traditional research and scholarship have been shrinking. It is both paradoxical and frustrating that this should occur just when access to the area and its scholarly resources is more open to foreigners than ever before.

Meanwhile, the collapse of the budgets of formerly state-funded academic institutions within the area of the former Soviet bloc, has crippled their ability to support their own scholars. As the political barriers to the purchase of foreign literature disappeared, so did the funds available for such purchase. The few area libraries with subscriptions to our journal are finding them difficult to continue; and exchange arrangements with foreign institutions in general have faded as exchangeable domestic publications become harder to acquire. Paradox strikes there as well as here: scholars within the area are no longer prevented on political grounds from reading foreign publications or becoming members of learned societies abroad. But they can afford to do neither.

External aid, such as that provided by the Soros Foundation, has typically addressed needs in education by creating new institutions and agencies rather than by propping up old structures. As a result, administrators, faculty, and researchers throughout the area are looking for (and obliged to look for) new sources of income; and visiting foreign scholars are often viewed in a new light as potential sources of revenue. Thanks to need-driven academic enterprise, foreign scholars can get help today with anything from finding a room near the metro, to recondite archival research.

All sorts of new schools, new programs and new agencies offer instruction, collaboration, or information/communication services. The impossibility of screening the credentials of such groups, or the legitimacy of purportedly academic programs, has created an unfamiliar set of problems. The AAASS has put together a check list of questions that we advise students to consider before signing up for any program of study in the area, but the generic advice at present is: caveat emptor.

On the brighter side, the crystallization of new forms that we see in the area includes the emergence of some new learned societies that are in the process of reaching out for international contacts. ICCEES has received a number of requests from such bodies, seeking recognition and affiliation. Just as it is difficult to assess the credentials of the new schools, it is proving difficult in some cases to determine which of these new organizations truly represents which scholarly community and in what area. The recent redefinition of political boundaries has complicated the delimitation of organizational boundaries, shifting them from the former “All-Union” parameters to new national lines.

So perhaps the most interesting point about the internationalization of knowledge in our field is that it is proceeding on the basis of a new nationalization of knowledge. Hegel and Marx may be out. But the dialectic is alive and flourishing in Slavic studies.