Professor Linkhoeva will present her research on colonial policies by the Soviet and Japanese regimes on the Mongolian territories (Buriatia, Outer and Inner Mongolia). The historiographical division between the communist bloc (Russia/Buriatia/Outer Mongolia/communist China) and the anticommunist bloc (Japan/Inner Mongolia/Manchuria/Republican China) has precluded identifying strategies and policies that great powers, regardless of their ideological preferences, deploy in dealing with “small people” caught in the regional power struggles. The talk shifts away from these national/ist perspectives and places compartmentalized experiences of the borderland people, the Buriat-Mongols, in the center of a history.

Dr. Tatiana Linkhoeva is Assistant Professor of Japanese History at New York University. Her forthcoming book, Revolution Goes East. Imperial Japan and Soviet Communism will be published by Cornell University Press in March 2020. 

Native of the republic of Buriatia (Russia), Dr. Linkhoeva graduated from Moscow State University, received her MA from the University of Tokyo, and PhD in History from UC Berkeley. She has been awarded fellowships from Japan’s Ministry of Education, the Japan Foundation, UC Berkeley, and the German Excellence Initiative.

Abstract: This presentation explores how many marginalized users of digital technologies are labeled as deviant. Many women and people of color utilize digital technologies for means beyond what they were intended.  For instance, gaming technologies and their associated online environments are often used as spaces to foster community among queer gamers who are not ‘out’ in their physical spaces but have the opportunity to be ‘out online’. Social media and other technologies afford Black users the means to resist physical oppression and mobilize around social justice issues. Ethnographic observations and narrative interviews reveal this Black digital praxis uncovering what Black cyberfeminists would articulate as the liberatory potentials of digital technologies.

Dunstan is the NCSU Assistant Director of the Office of Assessment. Her research examines dialect as an element of diversity that shapes the college experience, particularly for speakers of non-standardized dialects of English. Dunstan and Jaeger (2015) found that students from rural, Southern Appalachia felt that their use of a regional dialect put them at a disadvantage in the college classroom. The students interviewed by Dunstan reported that “they had been hesitant to speak in class, felt singled out, dreaded oral presentations, tried to change the way they talked, and felt that they had to work harder to earn the respect of faculty and peers”. In addition to speaking about her work with Appalachian college students, Dunstan would accompany members of the Department of Linguistics to a meeting with the UK office of Academic and Student Affairs to discuss how to meet the needs of all UK students, regardless of linguistic background.