Look Who it Was Random video

OLGA SHEVCHENKO 032111

1,260 views · Published 28 March 2011 · 43:48 · Indexed 29 October 2026

Channel: Williams College · 2011 · Film & Animation

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On Thursday, March 17, Olga Shevchenko, associate professor of sociology at Williams College, will present the final lecture of the year's annual Faculty Lecture Series. Her talk, titled "Crisis as a Way of Life: Culture of the Everyday in Today's Russia," will take place in Wege Auditorium at 4 p.m. A reception will follow the talk, which is free and open to the public. 

The decade of the 1990s marked a period of rapid and widespread change for the citizens of the Soviet Union, during which political opportunities, professional hierarchies, and cultural mores were all in flux. How did these multiple large-scale transformations manifest themselves on the level of everyday life? 

In her talk, Shevchenko will draw on ethnographic observation and repeated interviews with a cross-section of Muscovites in the late 1990s to understand how people made sense of their post-Soviet experience. Through these conversations, Shevchenko will explore the ways in which an understanding of these profound changes can contribute to our understanding of Russian politics and culture today.

Shevchenko's interests include visual sociology, social theory, sociology of culture, everyday life, and postsocialism. Her work has been published in Social Psychology Quarterly, Social Identities, and Journal of Consumer Culture, among other journals and books. 

In 2009, Shevchenko published a book titled Crisis and the Everyday in Postsocialist Moscow, which won both the Heldt Prize from the Association for Women in Slavic Studies and the Davis Center Book Prize in Political and Social Studies from the American Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 

Shevchenko joined the faculty in 2002. Her courses include Images and Society; Culture, Consumption, and Modernity; Memory and Identity; Communism and Its Aftermath; and Ways of Knowing.

Shevchenko received her B.A. equivalent from Moscow State University in 1996 and her Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Pennsylvania in 2002.

Produced by Bill Matthiesen '70, Berkshire Film & Video, www.bfv.com

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