Alexander Bikbov / Александр Бикбов

For those who are interested, here are three courses that I am giving at Ruhr-Universität Bochum in the fall 2023/24. The courses are held in English, in face-to-face sessions.

Protests in Eastern and Western Europe since 2010

The Russian army invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and international debate on the efficiency of Kremlin propaganda largely obscured the fields of civic critique and resistance in Russia and Ukraine, which fit into a larger space of citizen movements in Eastern and Western Europe. The purpose of the course is to revisit the earlier conditions of civic dissent and activism in several societies and to remap them in the war-time context of a growing political cohesion.

The course links together repertories of action, conceptual and biographical analysis, thus allowing to detect direct relations and structural similarities between Ukrainian Maïdan, Turkish Gezi, Russian Bolotnaya, Spanish Indignatos, American Occupy and French Yellow Vests. The approach developed in the course lets interpret more accurately the war-time transformations of civic sensibilities and tactics of civic counter-power in the changing framework of political authority.

Examining several well documented protest cases unfolded in different parts of Eastern and Western Europe, the course introduces into several important topics going far beyond the typical media coverage. This includes the ways social composition of the protest articulates with claims of leaderless governance and political representation; the role social justice and moral purity play in the inclusiveness and exclusiveness of the civic mobilization; visions of the right of rebellion and of the principles of non-violent resistance according to the educational patterns of the participants. The role of media coverage and of police repressions adds important dimensions in the explanation of the shape and repertory of civic movements.

Everyday life, consumption culture and planned leisure in the late Soviet Union, historical and regional shifts

Since the late 1950s and up to the late 1980s, Soviet governance knew a growing shift from a class-based antagonistic culture to a socially stratified and individually mapped model of the nation. The new culture of “peaceful coexistence“ was based on political and consumer technologies borrowed from a large scope of European and American techniques of governmentality (in terms of Michel Foucault). The governmentality is relying on a growing knowledge concerning population’s own qualities, objectively measured predispositions and even tastes, which serves the base for a rational (“scientific” in the Soviet case) management of its cohesion and loyalty. Soviet supermarkets and leisure camps, cinema theaters and even family flats were shaped in view of the acquired knowledge in demography and consumer practices, while making the population to accept centralized patterns of time usage and material infrastructure.

Tags: late soviet and post-soviet, mobilisation citoyenne, mouvements sociaux, public order, Russian society, social movement, sociologie du savoir, sociology, time management, urban, историческая социология, НИИ митингов, общественные движения, протест, рисунки общества, социальная история понятий, социальные классификации, социальный порядок, социология