Raino Isto, as part of Editorial Collective, edits special online issue of ARTMargins dedicated to Art and Race in Contemporary Central and Eastern Europe

As part of the ARTMargins Online editorial collective, Dr. Isto has just completed a two-month sequenced release of articles the group edited in a special issue dedicated to Art and Race in Contemporary Central and Eastern Europe.

Raino Isto (PhD, UMD '19) has been quite productive since graduating from the Department (and, honestly, before!).

As part of the ARTMargins Online editorial collective (Raino Isto, Susan Snodgrass, Sven Spieker, and Uroš Čvoro), Dr. Isto has just completed a two-month sequenced release of articles the group edited in a special issue dedicated to Art and Race in Contemporary Central and Eastern Europe. As they state in their editorial about the issue, "the impetus of our special issue was provided by, but should not be limited to, the recent rise in interest in issues of racial and social justice, and specifically the Black Lives Matter movement in the United States." The collected articles probe not only explorations of and appropriations of Blackness in central and eastern European societies, but as well interrogate constructions of whiteness as inherently european. As they say, "it is more crucial than ever to interrogate the codification and reinforcement of “whiteness” as an inalienable condition of what it means to be European, or to produce European culture, and to deconstruct the idea of certain groups as incompatible racial Others, construed as foreign to the region and its identities." This timely and important issue is available at https://artmargins.com/special-issue-art-and-race-in-contemporary-central-and-eastern-europe/

Congratulations Raino!