Eigen-Sinn: Citizen Empowerment and “Soft” Protest in the Soviet and Post-Soviet World
About the Summer School
Schedule of Events
Records
Contact
Downloads
About the Summer School
The summer school is dedicated to the topic Citizen Empowerment and “Soft” Protest in the Soviet and post-Soviet World and took place from May 2 to May 7, 2022.
The summer school is to be the first major event in Germany offering a balanced, interdisci-plinary, historically well-founded discussion of practices of disobedience and/or deviation from the reigning politics in Russia, bringing together young and established scholars from different countries and academic backgrounds.
Even in the countries with a harsh system of state surveillance, as in today’s Russia, there is still space for individual freedom and for a rather consistent resistance to power. This space can be found by considering not only textbook approaches to political agency of citizens, the paradigmatic examples of which would be participation in elections and protest demonst-rations, but also diverse opportunities of other, more local and less spectacular ways of dissident dealing with power.
The choice of the topic for our summer school reacts to the recently growing number of studies dealing with the relationship between power and people, state system and individual in the context of political non-freedom. We update and contextualize the notion of “Eigen-Sinn“, a term coined by the German historians Alf Lüdtke and Thomas Lindenberger at the beginning of the 1990s, in order to describe and investigate multifaceted, often non-confrontative practices and patterns of resistance in Russia from the late Soviet era to the present. It draws on the polysemous meaning of the German expression, meaning both stubbornness/obstinacy (that is, opposition to certain rules or demands), and one’s own/innate sense/meaning (that is, the creation of a meaningful attitude to life, especially in adverse political conditions). The concept allows for an interdisciplinary approach to the issue of civil resistance in different contexts and from different perspectives of sociology, political science as well as cultural and literary studies.
Records
All presentations were recorded and are available now under the following link:
Schedule of Events
10:00 –10:30 | Welcome and introduction Klavdia Smola, Christian Prunitsch & Holger Kuße |
10:30 –11:00 | Coffee break |
11:00 –12.30 | Lecture with discussion Klavdia Smola The social turn in contemporary Russian art |
12:30 –14:00 | Lunch |
14:00 –15:30 | Lecture Anastasiya Osipova The case of DOXA and the performative public practices of coping with confinement |
15:30 –16:00 | Coffee break |
16:00 –17:30 | Lecture with discussion Vera Dubina History of everyday life and microhistory: tracking the diversity of people/state relation under socialism |
18:00 | Dinner |
9:00 –10:30 | Lecture Timur Atnashev Discipline, Eigen-Sinn and inner freedom in the USSR and Germany in the XX century |
10:30 –11:00 | Coffee break |
11:00 –12:30 | Seminar Ilya Kukulin Perspectives of anti-authoritarian reconsideration of Russian culture and responsibility of intellectuals |
12:30 –14:00 | Lunch |
14:00 –18:00 |
Workshop (lecture & presentations) |
14:00 –15:30 |
Workshop (lecture) |
15:30 –16:00 | Coffee break |
16:00 –18:00 | Workshop (presentations) Evelina Rudenko Presentations of the results of working in groups |
18:00 –18:30 | Coffee break |
9:00 –10:30 | Seminar Tatiana Levina: Women-Philosophers in the USSR: Academic Activism, Dissidence and Feminism? |
10:30 –11:00 | Coffee break |
11:00 –12:30 | Seminar Timur Atnashev In the hobbles of the general party line: double-think, Aesopian language and theoretical innovations in the late USSR |
12:30 –14:00 | Lunch |
14:00 –15:30 | Seminar Lyubov Bugaeva Negotiating the system: Narratives of the alternative and the subaltern in Post-Soviet Russian cinema (Part I) |
15:30 –16:00 | Coffee break |
16:00 –17:30 | Seminar Lyubov Bugaeva Negotiating the system: Narratives of the alternative and the subaltern in contemporary Russian cinema (Part II) |
17:30 –18:00 | Coffee break |
18:00 –19:30 | Key note Thomas Lindenberger Neither Consent nor Opposition: Eigen-Sinn. About Compliance and Self-Assertion under Autocratic Rule |
9:00 –10:30 | Lecture Annelie Bachmaier Humor as a weapon: The case of “Grazhdanin poet” |
10:30 –11:00 | Coffee break |
11:00 –12:30 | Lecture Valery Vyugin Art, Eigen-Sinn and Conformism in Russia: the Early Thaw (1953 – 1954) |
12:30 –14:00 | Lunch |
14:00 –15:30 | Lecture with discussion Valery Vyugin Resistance of the Genre: The Post-Soviet Spy Comedy in Russia (1990s – 2010s) |
15:30 –16:00 | Coffee break |
16:00 –17:30 | Lecture Ilya Budraitskis Earning for the state: The political strategies of Moscow Actionism from the 1990s to 2010s |
17:30 –18:00 | Coffee break |
18:00 –19:30 | Lecture-Performance Pavel Arsenev Propaganda by deeds, or linguo-pragmatic software of resistance |
10:00 –12:30 | Excursion in Dresden old town |
12:30 –19:00 | Excursion to Saxon Switzerland |
9:00 –10:30 | Lecture Presentation with an activity (writing scenario) Selby Durdyeva When Protest Starts from Ourselves: Finding Voice through Language and Action |
10:30 –11:00 | Coffee break |
11:00 –12:00 | Concluding Round Table Klavdia Smola, Vera Dubina, Ilya Budraitskis, Ilya Kukulin, Pavel Arsenev and others Pluralizing Eigen-Sinn in Today‘s Eastern Europe |
12:00 –13:00 | Final discussion Evaluation of summer school |
13:00 –14:00 | Lunch |
16:00 –18:00 | Visiting Dresden museums |