International Network in Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies INREES

The INREES project has organised four five-day international summer schools in Finland and one three-day spring school at the University of Tartu. These events have offered lectures, panel discussions and workshops in which doctoral students have presented their papers and discussed such topics as publishing, academic career and pedagogy. For each event, around twenty applications by doctoral researchers and up to five by master’s students have been accepted. The participants have represented universities from Finland, Australia, Croatia, Estonia, Germany, Great Brittain, France, Italy, Poland, Russia, Sweden and Switzerland. The feedback that has been gathered after the summer schools have been extremely positive. The majority of respondents have esteemed the programs high quality and they have greatly appreciated the opportunity to form new networks.

The project has organised three calls for applications for research visit grants and offered funding for seventeen Finnish and international doctoral researchers. At the beginning of the projects, the INREES granted this funding for the Finnish doctoral researchers to visits in Russian universities and for Russian doctoral candidates to visit the University of Helsinki. After Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the exchange program restarted with the universities of Bremen, Glasgow, Tartu and Södertön. During their two-month research visits, the INREES fellows have gathered material for their research projects, finalised academic articles or their doctoral dissertations. In the host universities, they have received supervision from their assigned academic hosts.

The INREES has organised seminars in which doctoral researchers have presented their research projects and received comments from discussant that have been established scholars from different disciplines. Information about the INREES events and news have been disseminated in its own websites and social media accounts, but also in different academic email lists and websites as well as in the social media accounts of the INREES network scholars.

During its course, the project faced some unexpected challenges. First, the COVID pandemic enforced the project to cancel some events or to organise these in hybrid format and postpone some research visits. Second, because of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 the INREES suspended collaboration with Russian universities. Instead of organising events or research visits to Russia, the project intensified collaboration with its partner universities in Bremen, Glasgow, Tartu and Södertörn, launching a new program of exchange research visits with these. Though the drastically changed political situation has meant that some of the plans of the project could not be implemented, it also emphasised the importance of the international networks that this project had maintained and created. As scholars have been compelled to reconfigure their research question and approaches and obtaining materials and reliable information from Russia have become increasingly difficult, the opportunity for collaboration and change of ideas with European colleagues is increasingly critical for young Finnish scholars and Finnish academic community.