Authors

Petr Torkanovskiy¹;  ¹ King's College London, UK

Discussion

In contemporary Russia, opportunities for academic research in various fields related to politics (i.e. social theory, anthropology, political philosophy, etc.) are limited due to: 1) the authoritarian political regime; 2) the rigidity and self-censorship of post-Soviet academic institutions. As a result, entire disciplines (such as ‘human rights' or gender studies) are obliterated from universities’ curricula. Cooperation with international scientific communities is obstructed. From an external academic perspective, it might seem that there is no space left for discussions of the recent developments in social sciences. I would argue that such discussions take place beyond academia – primarily in Telegram groups and channels initiated by grassroots researchers’ communities. While these channels can be overlooked by sociologists of science, they are popular among younger scholars. Some of them count more than 30,000 subscribers (e.g. ‘(Не)занимательная антропология’). I will utilise digital ethnographic methods to analyse these communities.
In my presentation, I will address such questions as: how did Telegram become the primary platform for communication among Russian social scientists and intellectuals? How do Russian researchers use social media to disseminate information about their work and comment on developments in their scientific fields? I will conclude by examining how the Russian invasion of Ukraine affected the actors involved in knowledge production processes.