Yerevan Center for International Education - YCIE

Curating Infrastructures – Critical Spatial Research Encounters, an international event funded and organized as part of the YCIE Co-Funded Conferences program, welcomes emerging social sciences and humanities researchers, artists, curators, architects, and editors to join a three-day gathering in Yerevan dedicated to examining infrastructures as spatial, political, and cultural conditions shaping contemporary life.

Working language: English
Format: In-person event only
Deadline: July 20, 2026

📌 Learn more and apply: https://yerevancenter.org/news/cfc-2026-curating-infrastractures-cfp/

Contact: [email protected]

On June 5, we were thrilled to host Harutyun Vermishyan (Head of the Chair of Theory and History of Sociology and Co-Investigator of the Territorial Studies and Development Lab at YSU) for an insightful public lecture.

Grounded in urban sociological research and fieldwork from the ReCITY project and the Territorial Studies and Development Lab, the session dived into how residents actively shape their environments. From daily routines and informal practices to small-scale acts of care, the lecture examined the unique ways communities inhabit, maintain, and transform urban spaces.

📅 Don't miss our next event! Check out our upcoming public lectures and register in advance here: https://yerevancenter.org/events/

On May 29, the YCIE office was packed for a public lecture by our research fellow, Élodie Gavrilof. Presenting her paper, "Visualising the Other: Azerbaijanis in Armenian Satirical Caricature in the Early 20th Century," she investigated the visual construction of the Azerbaijani “Other” during the early 1900s. As most of these caricatures predate 1915, the study firmly places them within the late imperial context of the Tsarist Caucasus.

We have two more public lectures left this semester. Make sure to register so you don't miss out!
📅 June 12 - Between Agency and Betrayal: Ukrainian Women Refugees and the Double Bind of Deservingness | Anna Popovych
🔗 https://yerevancenter.org/event/between-agency-and-betrayal-ukrainian-women-refugees-and-the-double-bind-of-deservingness/

📅 June 26 - Affective Spaces: Generations and Narrated Experiences of Urban Change in Riga’s Soviet-era Neighborhoods - Lois Kalb
🔗 https://yerevancenter.org/event/affective-spaces-soviet-era-neighborhoods-generations-and-the-experience-of-urban-social-change-in-riga-1950s-2020s/

Meet Anna Popovych, our new research fellow! ⭐️

She is a Ph.D. candidate in Sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, originally from the Kyiv region of Ukraine. She holds a Master’s in Global Economy from Kyiv National Economic University (2006) and a Master’s in Global Labor from Penn State University (2019). Her dissertation focuses on how ongoing war disrupts and reshapes the system of meanings guiding social action.

Currently, Anna is developing a project on the post-amputation rehabilitation of war veterans. This research explores how varying interactional contexts of prosthetic treatment shape veterans’ recovery processes, sense of belonging, and visions of the future. Her other research includes the impact of wartime conditions on reproductive discourse in Ukraine, political attitudes of internally displaced persons (IDPs) from Donbas, and the moral climate among Ukrainian war refugees.

🗓️ Register for Anna Popovych's upcoming public lecture: https://www.facebook.com/share/18nJ5BMPvj/

How did science work across socialist and post-socialist Eurasia: through institutions, infrastructures, cities, technologies, networks, and people? YCIE invites proposals for an international conference in Yerevan on the agency and infrastructures of knowledge in the 20th and 21st centuries. We especially welcome papers on scientific cities, research institutes, universities, big science, nuclear and space programmes, cybernetics, computer networks, knowledge transfers, scientific heritage, and cultural representations of science.

Deadline: August 2, 2026
Working language: English
Format: in person
No registration fee

📌 Learn more and apply: https://yerevancenter.org/news/cfc-2026-unionize-the-science-cfp/

Contact: [email protected]

In this episode of our podcast, we spoke with social anthropologist, Konrad Siekierski. He earned his PhD from the Department of Theology and Religious Studies, King’s College London in 2023. Currently, Konrad as an assistant professor in the Institute of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology, University of Lodz and a lecturer in the Department of Armenian Studies, Pázmány Péter Catholic University in Budapest. He specialises in the anthropology of religion and Armenian Studies. Konrad’s research focuses on pilgrimage, material religion, diasporic religion, and religious innovations.

Listen to the 🎙
• Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/4fe2Kan
• Spotify: https://spti.fi/djNBrRs
• YouTube: https://youtu.be/g1CfOQPUQAw

В этом выпуске нашего подкаста мы поговорили с социальным антропологом Конрадом Секерским. В 2023 году он защитил докторскую диссертацию на факультете теологии и религиоведения King’s College London. В настоящее время Конрад является доцентом Института этнологии и культурной антропологии Лодзинского университета и преподавателем кафедры арменоведения Католического университета имени Петера Пазмани в Будапеште. Он специализируется на антропологии религии и арменоведении. Исследования Конрада посвящены паломничеству, материальной религии, религии диаспоры и религиозным инновациям.

Here are photos from the public lecture by YCIE Fellow David Leupold (Humboldt University).

In his presentation, he sought to decode from the historical texts key discursive prisms that had informed Ottoman travelers’ gaze upon the “Empire’s East”: the imperial-religious prism, the colonial-modernizing prism, and the proto-national prism. All three prisms tapped into wider discourses of the period essential for the understanding of the “Ottoman gaze” as an expression of a “nationalizing empire.”

🗓️ Register for our upcoming public lectures: https://yerevancenter.org/events/

Élodie Gavrilof is the next to join YCIE as part of our Research Fellowship Program for the 2025-2026 academic year! ⭐️

She holds a PhD in contemporary history (EHESS, 2024), recognised with a prize for best thesis in history of education by the French Ministry of Education’s History Committee (CHIMEN, 2026). Her dissertation examined how Armenian schools in Turkey and Soviet Armenia negotiated questions of language, memory, and identity under Kemalist and Soviet constraints during the interwar period (1919–1939).

Élodie Gavrilof is currently an associate researcher at CERCEC (EHESS, Paris) and IFEA (Istanbul), and teaches modern and contemporary history in the Eurasian Studies department at INALCO. Her research now centres on the long-term construction of Turkish and Azerbaijani otherness in Armenian national narratives, examining how mechanisms of dehumanisation are rooted in the violent history of the 19th and 20th century. Drawing on Armenian archives, satirical press, and cartographic sources, it combines microhistorical analysis with Border Studies approaches. Part of this project also engages with online memory narratives surrounding the Nagorno-Karabakh conflicts, mobilising OSINT methodologies to analyse the circulation and reappropriation of historical narratives on social media.

She has also worked on the trajectory of the Tbrotsaser school, an Armenian institution that fled the Ottoman Empire and resettled near Paris after years of exile. Tracing how the school, its teachers, and its pupils migrated together reveals the mechanisms of exile and integration at a microhistorical scale, and shows how a diasporic institution reinvented itself within the French educational landscape. Her work on this project has been accepted for publication in Histoire de l’Éducation.

Introducing the Second Keynote Speaker of Y-Conference: SPACES

Mathijs Pelkmans is Professor of Anthropology at The London School of Economics and leader of the Caucasus research group at the Austrian Academy of Sciences. A specialist in the shifting ideological landscapes of the Caucasus and Central Asia, his acclaimed work includes Defending the Border (2006) and Fragile Conviction (2017). His recent research, supported by an ERC grant, investigates the "instability of knowledge" and the complex "trading of truths" across the South Caucasus.

Join us on May 23 at 18:15 at ibis Hotel (5/1 Northern Ave, Yerevan) for his keynote presentation, “Spatial Morphology: How Missionary Encounters Reconfigure Religious Space,” moderated by Ekaterina Pravilova.

Applying a morphological lens to social and religious spaces, Professor Pelkmans will explore:
• How space acquires specific forms and patterns through the interaction between missionary projections and the engagement of local populations.
• The striking similarities in vision between Orthodox Christian, Evangelical, and Tablighi missions, and why these shared impulses produce such different social outcomes.
• The "wave" metaphor of missionization: how missionary momentum builds up, disperses, or crashes against distinct economic and political landscapes.

🔗 Learn more about the YCIE second annual conference, discover the program and register in advance: https://yerevancenter.org/program/y-conference-2026-spaces/

Introducing the First Keynote Speaker of Y-Conference: SPACES

Catriona Kelly is a Senior Research Fellow in Russian and Soviet Culture at Trinity College, University of Cambridge. Her publications include over 200 books, articles, and book chapters on the social and cultural history of the Russian Empire and the USSR. Her most recent book is Soviet Art House: Lenfilm Studio under Brezhnev (Oxford University Press, 2021), and she is currently working on Film Factory of Nations: Historical Film in the USSR, 1956-1991, based on archival work in eleven of the USSR’s union republics, including Armenia.

On the first day of the conference, May 22, 10:00 at ibis Hotel (5/1 Northern Ave, Yerevan), she will deliver her keynote speech, “Socialist, National, Local: Late Soviet Spaces,” moderated by Simon Franklin.

Drawing on her expertise in urban culture and the politics of memory, her talk will explore:
• What defined "socialist" or "Soviet" spaces and whether recognizable settlement patterns existed across the territory.
• The practical success of the Khrushchev and Brezhnev-era push for spatial homogeneity (including the 1955 Decree on Architectural Excesses and the 1961 secret law on statuary).
• The role of space in the Soviet imaginary versus its ideological significance.

🔗 Learn more about the YCIE second annual conference, discover the program and register in advance: https://yerevancenter.org/program/y-conference-2026-spaces/