Yerevan Center for International Education (YCIE)

The second annual Y-Conference took place in Yerevan from May 22 to 24. This year's conference, which focused on SPACES, was a resounding success and almost tripled in size. In 2025, we hosted 11 panel sessions with 47 speakers; in 2026, we welcomed 32 sessions and 154 speakers, including twice as many Armenia-based researchers as in 2025, both from local institutions and among independent scholars.

The highlights of the conference were the keynote talks given by Catriona Kelly (University of Cambridge) and Mathijs Pelkmans (London School of Economics and Political Science). We are grateful to both for the depth and energy they brought to the event.

🟠 Stay tuned for updates! The announcement for the third annual Y-Conference is almost here.

More photos here.

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This lecture by Lois Kalb explores the Soviet-era neighborhoods of Riga as affective spaces – as spaces that produce a variety of sentiments for their inhabitants. It asks how Latvian and Russian-speaking residents feel about their neighborhoods, what urban spaces represent to them, and how they articulate their affects in relation to dominant political and public discourse. Using oral histories, the lecture uncovers the narrated and lived experiences of the late Soviet period and the decades after socialism that shaped the affectivity and attachments of residents.

📅 June 26, 2026
⏰ 6:00 PM
📍 3 Aram Khachatryan St., Yerevan + Online

Register in advance!

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!

Contact: curatinginfrastructures@gmail.com

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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.

Currently, Anna is developing a project on the post-amputation rehabilitation of war veterans. 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!

How do war refugees evaluate themselves within discourses of inclusion and exclusion in migration-sensitive political contexts? Drawing on interviews with Ukrainian female refugees in Germany, Anna Popovych shows that they assess their worth through two conflicting evaluative frameworks: how they believe the host society judges them and how they imagine compatriots back home morally evaluate their departure. This paper contributes to sociological understandings of refugee agency and the overlooked nexus between war-induced migration and heightened wartime national consolidation.

📅 June 12, 2026
⏰ 6:00 PM
📍 3 Aram Khachatryan St., Yerevan + Online

Register in advance!

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!

Contact: timofey.rakov@gmail.com

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 #podcast 🎙
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This public lecture by Harutyun Vermishyan explores how Armenian cities are shaped not only by plans, policies, and large-scale redevelopment, but also by the ordinary rhythms and care practices of everyday life. Drawing on urban sociological research and fieldwork conducted within the framework of the Territorial Studies and Development Lab and the ReCITY project, the lecture examines how residents inhabit, maintain, negotiate, and transform urban spaces through daily routines, informal practices, and small-scale acts of care.

📅 June 5, 2026
⏰ 6:00 PM
📍 3 Aram Khachatryan St., Yerevan + Online

Learn more and register in advance!

This paper by Elodie Gavrilof investigates the visual construction of the Azerbaijani “Other” in Armenian satirical caricature during the early twentieth century. Most of these caricatures predate 1915, placing them firmly within the late imperial context of the Tsarist Caucasus. By analysing these images at their historical genesis, this public lecture explores how representations of alterity began taking shape within Armenian political and popular culture, influenced by imperial hierarchies and the complex dynamics of interethnic coexistence and rivalry in the region.

Discussant: Naira Sahakyan (American University of Armenia)

📅 May 29, 2026
⏰ 6:00 PM
📍 3 Aram Khachatryan St., Yerevan + Online

Learn more and register in advance!

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 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.

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.

🔗 Learn more about the YCIE second annual conference, discover the program and register in advance!

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.

🔗 Learn more about the YCIE second annual conference, discover the program and register in advance!