Siberia and the Russian Far East: Past, Present, and Future--The Tenth British Universities' Siberian Studies Seminar

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Founded in Lancaster, England in 1982, the British Universities' Siberian Studies Seminar (BUSSS) is the only organization in the world that is exclusively dedicated to the intellectual development of specialists in Siberia and the Russian Far East. It is an international, multidisciplinary scholarly organization that has met nine times through 2004. The Tenth BUSSS is scheduled to meet for the first time outside of the UK or Russia in Houston, Texas between April 7 and 11, 2004. It will comprise a maximum of 73 scholars from 9 different countries, including: 30 from the United States; 11 to 22 from Russia; 8 from the United Kingdom; 5 from Germany; 3 from Canada; 2 from Australia; and 1 each from Denmark, Italy, and the Netherlands. Sixty scholarly papers, ranging from studies of "contested environmental space" to "the land of the singing boats," will be presented via 10 panels. One out of five of the participants will be geographers or earth scientists.Although the Tenth BUSSS will be conceptually various, it will not be without an underlying theme. This will deal with the question of whether Siberia and the Russian Far East, two of the most sparsely populated regions on earth, are not, indeed, "overpopulated," as has been argued cogently in a recent publication of the Brookings Institution (The Curse of Siberia. 2004). The international, multidisciplinary nature of the BUSSS permits the mixing and cross-fertilization of ideas from Siberian and Far Eastern specialists throughout the world. To date, an entire generation of Siberian specialists has been nurtured by the interrelationships developed at the seminars. In the last dozen years, increasing numbers of Russian specialists have been able to join their Western colleagues in mutual research projects. Three published anthologies have incorporated papers from prior meetings, and the Tenth BUSSS will be the platform for a fourth. The book will be edited by Victor Mote and Bella Bychkova-Jordan and produced by Routledge/Curzon Press, a subsidiary of the Oxford-based Taylor & Francis Group in the UK.