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Join us to celebrate the launch of a special issue of the journal Digital Icons: Studies in Russian, Eurasian and Central European New Media. The issue, “Digital Selves: Embodiment and Subjectivity in New Media Cultures in Eastern Europe and Eurasia,” is available in open access at digitalicons.org
This issue considers the role of the physical and sensory body in relation to social identities and minority advocacy in regional digital culture. Engaging conversations in disability studies, queer studies, and feminist studies, the articles in the issue consider gender, disability, and LGBTQ identity as both embodied and online.
The launch will feature brief presentations by participating authors on civilians at war in Ukraine, the assemblage of vibrant disability counterpublics on the Russophone internet, contestations around concepts of ethnicity and heritage in Russia’s border regions through digital music online, queer stories of coming out in Russia and anti-homophobia protest in Poland. With an overview of the project from co-editors of the special issue Cassandra Hartblay and Tatiana Klepikova and a response from Sasha Kurlenkova, PhD Candidate in Media, Culture, and Communication at NYU
Speakers
Svetlana Borodina, Mellon Teaching Fellow at the Harriman Institute and Lecturer in the Department of Anthropology, Columbia University
Clinton Glenn, PhD candidate in Communication Studies at McGill University
Cassandra Hartblay, Director of the Centre for Global Disability Studies, University of Toronto Scarborough
Tatiana Klepikova, Postdoctoral Fellow and Lecturer at the Department of Culture and Literature of East-Central and Eastern Europe at the University of Potsdam
Sasha Kurlenkova, PhD Candidate in Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University
Philippa Mullins, PhD candidate in the Social Policy Department, London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE)
Ela Przybyło, Assistant Professor in English and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Illinois State University
Anya Shatilova, PhD candidate in the Ethnomusicology Program at Wesleyan University
Alisa Sopova, PhD candidate in the Anthropology Department of Princeton University
Biographies
Author of “On Making Presence: Blind Authors’ Digital Storytelling in Russia”
Clinton Glenn is a PhD candidate in Communication Studies at McGill University, Montreal, Canada. His dissertation research examines the material urban fabric of the three Baltic capitals, Tallinn (Estonia), Rīga (Latvia), and Vilnius (Lithuania), through an exploration of LGBT pride marches under the banner of Baltic Pride. His dissertation research has been supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the European Union Development Fund through the Archimedes Foundation/Estonia, and the Education Exchanges Support Foundation of Lithuania. His work has been featured in esse: art + opinions, Unmediated, Synoptique: An Online Journal of Film and Moving Image Studies, Lambda Nordica, and SQS: The Journal of Finnish Queer Studies.
Author of ‘Я – ГЕЙ! (I am gay!)’: Russian Coming Out Video Narratives on YouTube
Cassandra Hartblay is Assistant Professor in the Department of Health & Society and Director of the Centre for Global Disability Studies at the University of Toronto Scarborough, as well as a member of the University of Toronto graduate faculty in the Department of Anthropology and the Centre for European, Russian & Eurasian Studies. She is author of I WAS NEVER ALONE or Oporniki: An Ethnographic Play on Disability in Russia (University of Toronto Press 2020), and her scholarship has appeared in American Ethnologist, Disability Studies Quarterly, among other publications.
Author of Editorial — Issue 21, Bodyminds Online: Digitally Mediated Selves in Regional Cultural Context
Tatiana Klepikova is a Postdoctoral Fellow and Lecturer at the Department of Culture and Literature of East-Central and Eastern Europe at the University of Potsdam. She studied Slavic, Anglophone, and Hispanic Literatures and Cultures in Yaroslavl and Passau and held a postdoctoral fellowship in Women and Gender Studies at the University of Toronto. Her work is focused on Russian queer theater and drama. She is co-editor of several edited collections, including Outside the “Comfort Zone”: Private and Public Spheres in Late Socialist Europe (De Gruyter, 2020) and editor and translator of Contemporary Queer Plays by Russian Playwrights (Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2021).
Author of Editorial — Issue 21, Bodyminds Online: Digitally Mediated Selves in Regional Cultural Context
Sasha (Aleksandra) Kurlenkova is a social scientist interested in the body, technologies, and disability. In 2015-2016, Sasha gained a Master’s degree in Sociology from Shaninka (Moscow School of Social and Economic Sciences). She also worked as a researcher at the Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology, Russian Academy of Sciences, studying sensory practices and assistive technologies used by blind and low-vision people, through ethnography and qualitative interviews. Since 2018, Sasha has been a PhD student at the New York University Department of Media, Culture, and Communication where she studies the organization of assisted / eye-tracker-mediated interactions of kids with speech disabilities inside Russian-speaking families. She uses Ethnography and Conversation Analysis to understand the multimodal methods and resources used by kids and their families to talk to each other: from low-tech (gaze, gestures, objects in the environment) to high-tech (a speech-synthesizer, an eye-tracker).
Philippa Mullins is a PhD candidate at the Social Policy Department of the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). Her research investigates disability organizing in Russia. It explores how the depoliticization of disability both creates opportunity and restricts action in a context where the dominantly legitimized role of civil society is depoliticized.Author of “But We Are Always at Home’: Disability and Collective Identity Construction on Runet”
Ela Przybyło is Assistant Professor in English and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Illinois State University. She is the author of Asexual Erotics: Intimate Readings of Compulsory Sexuality (Ohio State University Press, 2019) and editor of On the Politics of Ugliness (Palgrave, 2018), as well as many peer-reviewed articles and chapters including in such journals as Feminist Formations, GLQ, Feminism & Psychology, and Radical Teacher. Ela is a founding and managing editor of the intersectional, peer-reviewed, open access journal Feral Feminisms, which is committed to equitable knowledge making and sharing (www.feralfeminisms.com). Find her online at: https://przybyloela.wordpress.com/.
Anya Shatilova is a Ph.D. candidate in the Ethnomusicology program at Wesleyan University (Middletown, CT, United States). Her research interests include various musical and sound practices in contemporary and Imperial Russia as well as dissemination of Russian traditional instrumental music outside the country. Anya received a BM in Music Performance from St. Petersburg State University of Culture and Arts (Russia), MM in Musicology from the New England Conservatory of Music (Boston, MA, United States), and MA in Ethnomusicology from Wesleyan University (Middletown, CT, United States).
Alisa Sopova is a doctoral candidate at the Anthropology Department of Princeton University. She holds a BA in journalism from Moscow State University and an MA in Regional Studies from Harvard University. Her research interests focus on the production of resilience in the civilian communities in the war zone in Eastern Ukraine. Born and raised in Donetsk, currently the capital of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic, she engages with her own community as a scholar and a journalist. She seeks to investigate the specifics of everyday life in the environment of military conflict and adjustments and coping mechanisms employed by its residents in order to recreate the normality of their livelihoods.
Event Video
Featured Image Credit: Anna Parkina, The Case Is Open II, 2007, digital reproduction of multimedia collage on board
