Diversity (or the lack of it) in Eurasia studies: an interview with Emily Couch
In Spring last year Emily Couch wrote a blog post about the need for more diversity in the field of Eurasia studies that piqued our interest. The Pushkin House team contacted Emily, who at the time was finishing up her masters degree and her year studying in Moscow at the Higher School of Economics (before taking up an internship at the the Kennan Institute in Washington D.C.), to ask if she would speak to us about her personal views and experiences regarding diversity in the study of the Eurasia region. The publication of the interview conducted by Pushkin House’s Rafy Hay was delayed but the current interest in the topics of race and diversity sparked by the murder of George Floyd has given us the opportunity to return to it. Emily asked us if she could review her original interview responses to take in the year’s events and, in the final part of this discussion published below, she updates us on the progress made on her initiatives since last year.
Disclaimer: the views expressed in this interview are solely those of the interviewee in her personal capacity and do not reflect those of any organisation.
Rafy Hay [Pushkin House]: Could you give us a bit of background about yourself and the project and your blog post?
Emily Couch: I am currently working in Washington DC, where I recently finished an internship with the Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies. If you had asked me four years ago where I thought I’d be at this point in life, I would absolutely not have envisaged my current circumstances. This is because my first degree was in English Literature [from King’s College, University of London], so nothing to do with Eurasia & East European Studies. I then took a year out, during which time I realized that Eurasia & East European Studies was what I wanted to do. So then I chose a double degree programme with UCL’s School of Slavonic and East European Studies (SSEES) [Masters in Post-Soviet Politics & Security] where it's one year in London and one year at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow. And sort of from the moment that I started studying at SSEES I noticed that there was clearly a different attitude and atmosphere towards non-conventional perspectives than I had experienced on my undergraduate degree.
I was also particularly surprised by the lack of students of colour. There's quite a large Chinese contingent, but they tend to all be from China and there wasn't really any diversity within the domestic pool. I thoroughly enjoyed my time at SSEES, but the perspectives that are considered mainstream and acceptable to write about were more restrictive than those I had experienced in the field of literature. So, theories of gender performativity, for example, were widely accepted or understood. I found it quite surprising after my undergraduate degree where it was taken - not for granted - but it was not considered strange if you brought that up in a seminar.
So really I think since my first semester at SSEES the idea [of a need for more diversity] was brewing. After one semester, I realised that we had not been set one reading by a scholar of colour which – when I thought about it – was disheartening but not surprising. That realisation made me really start to develop the ideas that became the blog post. It took a very long time to write because I was trying to be very careful not to make sweeping generalizations and just to say what my personal experience had been.
Rafy Hay: Why do you think the subject hasn't really come up in a big way before?
Emily Couch: I think there are two reasons. Firstly, I think it’s because, unfortunately, areas studies including Eurasia Studies, are not broadly valued by society like, for example, the STEM subjects. So it's considered a problem when there isn't diversity in say maths or science, because those are considered to be the socially valuable subjects. But when it comes to "lesser" things, even like English Literature or Eurasia Studies, they're considered niche anyway and so it's therefore seen as less of an issue if there isn't diversity in those spheres.
Secondly, I think the Eurasia studies field – and I do not just mean academia here, but also policy analysis and journalism – is to some extent unwilling to recognise its own shortcomings. There’s a certain degree of defensiveness, which I think also stems from the fact that there’s an assumption that only people with a personal connection to the region can offer ‘real’ analysis. There’s a real ‘gate-keeping’ mentality among some of the academics and practitioners with this background and, if I can say this, a certain degree of tunnel vision. There’s the assumption that only those with a personal connection – who, in the context of those who emigrated to the West, tend to be white – really ‘understand’ the region, or the oppression of the Soviet era. At first, this attitude may seem understandable, but when you think about it, it is really very exclusionary towards people of colour who might want to enter the field because they think – oh, I don’t have the same background so I won’t fit in, or my opinions won’t be seen as valid. I think that the vital work of scholars of colour like UC Berkeley’s Steven S. Lee – whose book on race in the early Soviet Union I reviewed for an online publication called Punctured Lines – and UPenn’s Kimberly St. Julian-Varnon – who researches Black experiences in the Soviet Union and the Post-Soviet space – shows that there is a real and urgent need for the fresh perspectives that people of colour in this field can offer.
Rafy Hay: Which areas of Eurasia Studies do you think would be better served by having wider diversity?
Emily Couch: That's a good question. I would say two areas. So firstly, one of the things that prompted me to write the blog was a debate on Twitter about Russophobia and whether that counted as racism, and if so, what kind of racism and how should we position that in terms of prejudice that other groups receive? And I was quite shocked by that debate because it was taking place almost entirely between white academics. It wasn't that any of them were saying anything that was truly offensive, but there was just a huge gap of experience in terms of, if you'd asked a black person or if you'd asked an Asian person who lived in Britain, do you think it's racist if we say X, Y, Z about Russian people, they would probably have a very different opinion. when we're talking about issues of prejudice, issues of orientalisation, it's really important that you get other perspectives rather than just this kind of coterie of white academics and practitioners deciding what Russophobia is and how to define it.
The other area is a bit obvious in the sense that the Soviet Union was incredibly geographically diverse and you often have too narrow a focus on the Slavic centre and not enough focus on, for example, the Central Asian countries. Now, of course, there's a lot of scholarship on those places, but from my experience - although I certainly don’t pretend to be a Central Asia expert - those books and those articles are often not written by people in those regions, and they are certainly not written by people of colour from Europe or the United States.
Rafy Hay: One thing in your blog that jumped out at me was that you say that Russia and Eastern Europe aren't 'capital R racist'. But when I was there, I did notice racism in a much more, I would say, open and aggressive way, in terms of the police pulling central Asian people out of the crowd to look at their documents and other smaller things. How is it different to racism in Britain?
Emily Couch: It is certainly different. While in Russia, I discovered that people were much more comfortable saying things to me which, in the US or the UK, are understood to be offensive. I got quite a lot of aggressive questions about my nationality and ethnicity. For instance, I lost track of how many times people in Moscow – from taxi drivers to ticket counter staff – demanded to see my passport because they didn’t believe I was British. Another example is once when I was writing an article for The Moscow Times on the famous theatre practitioner, Konstantin Stanislavsky, for which I interviewed a number of acting teachers in Russia’s most prestigious performing arts schools. One of these teachers kept asking me why I was writing about Russia and not ‘my culture’ – by which he meant East Asia. People in the UK probably have these thoughts, but it’s much less acceptable to say them. So one of the things that I was trying to address in the article is that, if you're a person of colour in Russia, or you're a woman, it's much harder to get research done because people are less willing to talk to you. And if they do talk to you, it's often not with respect, at least that's been my personal experience.
Rafy Hay: So is there a kind of specifically Russian or specifically Eastern European form of racism that's different from ours?
Emily Couch: That's an interesting question. I think it gets expressed differently in Russia. I find a lot of the time in the UK, it's very implicit and there’s a lot of structural racism, so you're less likely to encounter it directly. Although, when I had an ethnically Indian friend from Britain visit me in Moscow, there was a marked difference in the way he and I were treated. In the UK, people are more used to seeing British Indians and less used to seeing British Chinese, whereas in Russia it's almost the other way because they're used to seeing people from Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan who look more Asian. So I wouldn't say it's completely different, but I would definitely say it expresses itself in a different way and that, it sounds horrible to say, there's a different hierarchy of ethnicities in Russia.
July 2020 update
Rafy Hay: Could you tell us a bit more about the initiative you’ve started to take more concrete action around diversity in Eurasia studies?
Emily Couch: So, a lot has happened in the year since I wrote the blog post. The first thing I did was start making a preliminary list of academics, journalists and students of colour who are working on this area because I think it's not that we don't exist, it's just that there isn't a sense of community in that regard. And I thought it would be really helpful both for people like myself and the academics in question, but also for white academics to be able to access this resource of other perspectives because I believe that there's a similar initiative for gender balance in Eurasia studies, to get female academics more recognized for work in this area. So based on that initiative, I thought why not try and start something that's focused on people of colour? There was some interest in the list initially, but it really only gained widespread interest recently as the Black Lives Matter protests in the US have prompted people in all sectors to rethink how structural racism is embedded into the way they work. The list is called POC in Eurasia Studies. The numbers aren’t huge, but I hope that they will continue to grow and that this resource can both assure young people who want to enter the field that there is a place for them, and remind white academics and practitioners to spotlight the voices of their colleagues of colour.
In the offline sphere, I have been working closely with Brunilda Amarilis Lugo de Fabritz, who is the Russia Programme Director at Howard University here in Washington, D.C. Howard is one of the US’s most well-known historically black universities, and I have really been working with Amarilis to mentor African American students who are studying Eurasia. Amarilis has organised two conferences on diversity in Eurasia studies since last October – both of which I spoke at and attended – and I can say, without hyperbole, that they were both incredibly moving experiences. In the first, which was held in October 2019, we had Latinx and Indigenous students in addition to African Americans and I think that was really the first time that I had ever seen so many people of colour studying Eurasia in one room. This was a powerful, even emotional, moment for me. What I think both conferences showed is that the problem isn’t a lack of interest on the part of young people of colour, it’s a lack of will from institutions – and I don’t just mean universities here, but also think tanks, media outlets, etc. – to really foster this interest and create an empathetic environment that allows these young people to stay in the field. Speaking as a British East Asian, I can say that even just starting out there are numerous obstacles and micro-aggressions that you have to face as a person of colour – all of which are emotionally draining and exhausting. This is a feeling which, from my conversations with others, is widespread and which contributes to the lack of retention of young people of colour in the field.
Emily Couch
Emily Couch’s blog
Follow Emily Couch on Twitter @EmilyCouchUK
Pushkin House is planning more content around the issue of diversity in Eurasian studies and race and racial identity in Russia and the Soviet Union. If you would like to be involved, please contact Rebecca Ostrovsky or reach out to us on our social media.