ANYA EZHEVSKAYA
Creating, thinking, playing
BIO
Sharing A Love of Knowledge
Anya Ezhevskaya, PhD, is a Russian-American. An artist, a writer, a thinker. A parent and a spouse, a wannabe gardener, an amateur adventurer. Her academic interests span the gamut of creativity and Artificial Intelligence, painting restoration, social justice and trauma healing through the arts, bardic song, translation and missiology, Latin-American dance and migration studies.
Her non-academic interests are even more diverse and obscure: she is a fanatical mushroom hunter, she enjoys perfecting her hand at Russian folk craft painting, she takes her children and their friends on camping adventures. She has a penchant for online fine art auctions. She writes and dances salsa and cumbia. She really enjoys climbing walls. She also enjoys cheese.
Missiology
The question of language maintenance often arises in multilingual families, be it missionary families returning to the sending country or those that have moved permanently to start a new life. Parents committed to preserving the benefits their children have as bilinguals may struggle to maintain a vibrant knowledge of their children’s first language as the family enters a new linguistic environment. To support such parents and other individuals seeking to preserve bilingualism in the home and in the immediate community, this article offers insights from related linguistic fields. The author draws on personal experience, as well as translation studies and the concept of language planning from sociolinguistics, to examine techniques to keep the language in question active.
Global Forum on Arts and Christian Faith
The process for encouraging creativity to reach specific goals chosen by a community typically requires direct participation in the field. An arts advocate cannot rally for the use of the arts from afar, and intimate knowledge of a local community is critical for a successful outcome. However, with the onset of the virtual world as the new normal, unique online groups are forming over shared interests and identities. These groups fall under the definition of “community,” and as such, become possible venues where art consultants can encourage the use of the arts for people to thrive. An attempt to apply the Creating Local Arts Together approach to an online community is described here, highlighting each step of the process and detailing issues and concerns associated with bringing it online. With mostly positive results, we hope that our experience and insights gained will encourage subsequent exploration of doing creative, collaborative work in cyberspace.
Global Forum on Arts and Christian Faith
Anya Ezhevskaya contemplates Christine Valters Paintner's guide to incorporating photography into our devotional lives.
Society of Ethnomusicology Student News
In “(Un)doing Fieldwork,” ethnographer Michelle Kisliuk explores alternative modes of ethnography that might “erase the dichotomy between ‘experience’ and ‘scholarship,’ between ‘fieldwork’ and ‘writing’.” After all, researchers are not mechanical analyzers removed from the phenomena they study. Their interest in the subject matter is often born of personal experience, a cultural or historical connection, a family tie. Writing ethnomusicological work from a more subjective vantage point is challenging, “but if we proceed with caution (and practice),” Kisliuk posits, “we can use poetics—steeped in experience—to convey in writing what otherwise might never come across.” This essay is such an exercise in poetics, interweaving my own family story with a short history of Russian wartime song writing.
Global Forum on Arts and Christian Faith
This book review on Teaching Across Cultures highlights James E. Plueddemann's approach to education in cross-cultural settings. His effective metaphor, the two-runged rail fence, can be applied in many settings for connecting theoretical content to the practical needs of students across the board, while his recommendations to be learners first go a long way to bridge possible cross-cultural misunderstandings.
The Journal of Stained Glass
'Architecture arose out of a need to visualize the invisible’. 1 While the more widely accepted explanation for the rise of buildings is the need for shelter, this competing theory offers enticing explanations and poses deeper questions about what it means to be human. After all, non-human animals have also sought shelter and created structures to protect themselves from the elements, but only people have relied on designing three-dimensional space to represent concepts and experiences lived but unseen. Over the millennia, ‘communities of people have continually returned to architecture as a medium through which memory has some significant chance of survival’. 2 I dedicate this article to a specific element of architectural experience in a specific building: the multifaceted Nebula stained glass windows adorning the sanctuary of Webster Presbyterian Church in Houston, Texas, USA.
in: Curating the Self and Embracing the Community
This duoethnography explores the interactions that arise in relationships among international peers in online doctoral programs, specifically the messy aspects of online interpersonal relationships based on the experiences of two doctoral students in online U.S. programs who were also observers of international astronaut training. To collect data, we use recollections, authors’ journal entries, and text-based artifacts of peer communication. Publicly available astronaut diaries, observations, and other relevant publications constitute materials for comparing experiences. We draw parallels between behavioral markers identified for the behavioral training of space explorers and intercultural communication strategies employed by international students in online programs. RCT forms the theoretical foundation for this study. Findings showed unexpected similarities between some of the conditions experienced by space explorers and online doctoral students. The contribution of this study is a candid evaluation of the more problematic aspects of interpersonal relationships that are an integral part of authentic connections. We provide recommendations for building online relationships across cultural and geographical differences based on astronaut competencies.
