Summer is crucial for Syracuse University professors, who use the time to advance research, design and revise courses, and prepare for the upcoming academic year. Such pursuits enable them to return to campus with a renewed sense of purpose, benefiting our most important resource: you. Maxwell anthropologist Lauren Woodard shares how she used her summer break to prepare for the year ahead.
The Politics of Migration
The ripple effects of the war in Ukraine are felt everywhere. At Syracuse, the 11-year-old conflict—which has ramped up considerably since Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022—has begot timely and relevant scholarship.
Woodard, assistant professor of anthropology, recently traveled to the Georgian capital of Tbilisi and to major cities in South Korea to examine the war’s impact on migration patterns throughout Europe and Asia.
“Russian officials are threatening migrant workers with deportation and denaturalization unless they fight against Ukraine,” she says, adding that Central Asia has been a source of cheap Russian labor since the late 1990s.
Likewise, Russian citizens—fearing conscription and an authoritative political climate—have flocked to neighboring countries like Georgia and ones as far away as South Korea.
“Historically a country of emigration, South Korea is grappling with the impact of immigration and multicultural families in various aspects of society,” says Woodard, who recently visited a village in Gwangju housing one of Asia’s largest communities of ethnic Koreans from the former Soviet Union.
Her findings will be integrated into courses like Global Encounters: Comparing World Views and Values Cross-Culturally; Language, Culture and Society; and Migration, Borders, Belonging, a course that she has designed and is teaching next spring about migration-based global case studies.
Woodard also is planning follow-up trips to South Korea and Georgia next summer. “I’d love to take my students with me someday,” she says.
By Rob Enslin
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