For his PhD thesis at Oxford, Hrag Papazian looked into the understanding of Armenian identity and Armenianness in Turkey, namely the Christian Armenians, the migrant community from the Republic of Armenia and the Muslim and Alevi Armenians. Papazian says the constructs of identity between these three Armenian communities do not coincide and can often be contradictory.

  Melissa Bilal, an ethnomusicologist and assistant professor at the American University of Armenia spoke to EVN Report about Armenian feminists from the 19th and 20th centuries in the Ottoman Empire. Bilal is an author, co-author and editor of a number of books and publications on Armenian feminist writers. Together with Professor Lerna Ekmekcioglu of MIT, Bilal launched the Annual Feminist Armenian Studies Workshop and founded the Feminist Armenian Research Collective (FemArc).

  There are a host of problems and challenges with the healthcare sector in Armenia. Some of those include the double burden of disease, a surplus of doctors and surgeons (including more MRI machines in Yerevan than in some European cities) on the one hand, but poor health outcomes on the other; issues with health infrastructure, human resources, public health, medical education and the fact that less than 1.5 percent of GDP is spent on healthcare in the country. Pediatric surgeon and Assistant Professor of Surgery at UCLA, Dr. Shant Shekherdimian speaks with EVN Report's Maria Titizian about some of these issues and more.

World renowned violinist Sergey Khachatryan and his spouse Angela Garcia Lopez talk to EVN Report about their shared passion for music and Armenia, the need for a change in mentality, education, work ethic and much more.

  Anoush Baghdassarian, the co-creator of Rerooted, a digital archive that preserves testimonies of Syrian-Armenians who fled the conflict in Syria, speaks to EVN Report in this week’s podcast.

Israeli journalist and writer Yossi Melman identifies two specific challenges facing Armenian-Israeli relations: Israel's strategic relationship with Azerbaijan, namely selling weapons, and Israel's refusal to acknowledge the Armenian Genocide. Melman was the first journalist to report about how Israeli weapons manufacturer Aeronautics Defense Systems was asked by the Azerbaijani military in 2017 to operate a kamikaze drone against live Armenian targets.  

EVN Report’s editorial team members sat down with Lara Aharonian, Co-Founder and Co-Director of the Women’s Resource Center, who came under attack following a speech she delivered on International Women's Day where she stressed that laws protecting women in Armenia should take into consideration all types of women - from women living in border towns to single mothers to lesbians. This led to a flurry of online hate mail and death threats against Aharonian. While she has had to deal with hate speech in the past, the unprecedented attacks this time around compelled her to create an album on Facebook she called the Museum of Hate.

  International human rights expert and litigator Ara Ghazaryan scrutinizes the criminal underworld of crime bosses otherwise known as “Thieves-in-Law.” Find out what the Armenian government plans to do to eradicate these deeply rooted criminal elements in the country.

Author of EVN Report's White Paper "Transitional Justice Agenda for the Republic of Armenia," Dr. Nerses Kopalyan speaks about the imperative of transitional justice to help heal Armenian society and restore trust and faith in institutions.

  Varant Meguerditchian, the Executive Director of the Mining Legislation Reform Institute spoke to EVN Report about the weak laws regulating mining in the country, the impacts on communities and the environment and the critical need to reform the Armenian mining sector through legislation.