RUTA Election Results

In July 2025, two members of the RUTA Board of Representatives — Assel Tutumlu and Epp Annus — will be stepping down from their roles, while staying in the broader RUTA team and community. We would like to express our heartfelt thanks to Assel and Epp for their dedication, and contributions to RUTA’s mission over this past year. 

To fill these positions, RUTA members and the RUTA Election Committee have chosen two new Board members: Gražina Bielousova and Alexis Scott. 

Gražina Bielousova is an anthropologist of religion and politics working at the intersection of race, religion, and gender in east Europe. Her current project and forthcoming book focus on leftist feminists in east European countries that find themselves under the threat of Russia’s military expansionist politics, with particular attention to Ukraine. Gražina’s other academic interests include de- and post- colonial theory, global raciality, and socioeconomic inequality. She is currently a researcher at Vilnius University and an assistant professor at Vytautas Magnus University in Lithuania. Gražina sees serving on RUTA’s board as supporting resistance and amplifying the voices of activists, artists, and scholars who get drowned out by Russian or Western centred scholarship on the RUTA region. She wishes to contribute to building viable alternatives to the way that academia conducts its business as usual; a way to live into a bigger, bolder future of intellectual lives lived otherwise and to make RUTA’s vision and mission known throughout the Baltics in particular.

Alexis Scott is a scholar of Kyrgyz heritage committed to decolonial research. She holds a Master’s in Political Science from McGill and will begin her PhD there this fall. In her doctoral research, she aims to explore decolonial discourses and movements in Kyrgyzstan, placing them in comparative perspective with other RUTA-region countries. For Alexis, Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine prompted her to confront the enduring legacies of Russian colonial power structures in her home country and beyond. While attending the inaugural RUTA conference, she found an intellectually rigorous, emotionally open, and politically urgent space, helping her to navigate her own academic disorientation. As a Board Member, she hopes to contribute to cross-regional solidarity building, as well as to the creation of more inclusive spaces within the RUTA community, hoping to make way for more platforms for dialogue on inequalities within the RUTA regions themselves, whether linguistic, racial, economic, epistemic, or geographic.

We warmly congratulate Gražina and Alexis on their election and look forward to working with them in the RUTA team!