The origins and meanings of emotional media under War in Russia

Événement en présentiel

Lieu : Salle G009, rez-de-chaussée, 28 rue des Saints-Pères - 75007 Paris

L'événement est organisé par le groupe "Au-delà du postsoviétisme : dynamiques sociales et politiques" du CERI, en partenariat avec le séminaire "Autoritarisme, guerre et mobilisations dans l’espace postsoviétique" (CERCEC-EHESS).

Speaker :
Julia Lerner is an Israeli anthropologist of Russian origin, a Senior lecturer at the Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev and associated research fellow at ISP CNRS. Her research interests are in the fields of anthropology of knowledge and migration, both in the field of post-Soviet Russian culture and in the Russian-speaking migration. Her current research deals with emotionalization of culture - the social and political role of the therapeutic language in public and private domains. 

Moderator :
Kathy Rousselet, Sciences Po-CERI

During the first months of the Russian war in Ukraine, millions of Russian-language viewers both within Russia and elsewhere became addicted to certain YouTube format presented 1–2-hour videos staged as dialogs between a journalist and prominent figures in the public life of contemporary Russia.  Geared to overlap the personal and the public, the format combines private conversation with political expression in a manner novel for Russian-language media. Moreover, in a while, the genre was adopted by both dissent (ex. Skazhi Gordeevoy, vDud’) and patriotic (ex. Empatiya Manuchi) perspectives on the Russian cultural condition, political regime, and the violent events.  This talk follows the origins and meanings of this particular genre of public self-reflections and explains its significance in light of processes of contemporary emotionalization of public domains, culture of ‘new sincerity’ and a dominance of therapeutic-psychological formats.  Informed by contents of politics and collective historical narratives, on the one hand, and by intimate memories and personal moral dilemmas, on the other hand, the genre of the sincere emotional interviews has become a form of a political defiance, moral collective therapy but also an emotional work of conformity. 

Responsables scientifiques de l'événement : Vera Ageeva, Anna Colin-Lebedev, Juliette Faure, Gilles Favarel-Garrigues, Olivier Ferrando, Denys Gorbach, Elisabeth Miljkovic, Renata Mustafina, Kathy Rousselet, Ioulia Shukan, Tatyana Shukan, Victor Violier