Emotions in the Public Spaces of Post-Soviet Russia

In the past decades, the epistemological and methodological focus on emotions as a crucial element of social and political life, known as the ‘emotional turn’ in the social sciences and humanities, has emerged as a dominant prism of analysis.
This workshop seeks to bring this emotional turn into the study of post-Soviet Russian space.
Russian public spaces appear today as constituted by different powerful, sometimes contradictory, ideological trends which are strongly charged with emotions and recruit emotional language. The neoliberal economic and cultural regime constitutes an emotional style of a self-regulating, self-fulfilling Russian citizen which is responsible for his own wellbeing, while the new patriotic and nationalist discourse is based on nostalgic feelings, fear or disgust, and speaks directly to the lost imperial pride of post-Soviet citizens.
We aim to grasp which emotions are being incorporated into the language of the State, as well as its institutional and individual actors, and also to trace how emotions are recruited to create alternative spaces of social action, political protest and private life, within the public domain. We will investigate how emotions are embodied today in the constitution of State and citizenship, memory and processes of group mobilization.
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Moscow, Russia – April 21, 2016: Sculpture of the pioneers as an art installation at the festival “Moscow spring” in Moscow
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