Speaker: Karina Simonson, Assistant Professor at the Institute of Asian and Transcultural Studies, Vilnius University, and Postdoctoral fellow at Vilnius Academy of Arts, Lithuania

In this presentation, Karina Simonson will provide an overview of her postdoctoral book project, starting with a daring initial research idea, discussing its aims and tasks, facing an unexpectedly vast amount of primary material, and dealing with the current political challenges of working with the Soviet period sources.

The project aims to conduct complex research on Soviet Lithuanian children’s visual culture, revealing the representations of African and Asian history, culture, and people, contextualizing them in related research of children’s literature, theatre, film, and music, linking with Soviet “fraternity of peoples” ideology and geopolitical interests, and offering possible hypotheses of the origins of present-day manifestations of racism. The research is developed at the intersection of ideologized Soviet children’s culture and postcolonial theory. The project aims to go beyond local research and interpret the formation of race representation in the international context, filling the gap in Lithuanian and East European research.

Also streaming on YouTube.