Presentations by Streams

This panel is part of a larger interdisciplinary collective project, "Vanished Histories / Displaced Communities". Our aim is to explore how contemporary discourses and practices of inequality have deep-rooted origins in earlier processes and to unearth marginalized, dislodged and forgotten communities. The overarching goal of this project is to deconstruct the invisible, hidden and insular structures of Soviet and post-Soviet colonial modernities.

In this panel, we will examine diverse ways that this dynamics manifested itself in late Soviet and early Russian local professional and mass communities. These groups often existed outside of the capital and were actively engaged in creative fields, such as craft and design, fashion, audiovisual aesthetics, and unofficial photography. By paying attention to non-verbal media and material cultures we aim to visualise how the country swung back and forth, oscillating between liberal and conservative trends which were positioned on both the left and right sides of the political spectrum.

The projects created within these communities will be analyzed from three distinct perspectives:

Gender-related: we will explore how social stereotypes and gender roles were reflected in the objects of material and visual culture.

Regional: we will investigate how national and regional identities found expression in design and advertising and which tools were used to govern center-peripherial relationships.

Temporal: we will consider how remembering and acknowledging the past played a role in envisioning and creating the future within these communities.

In addition to these analytical viewpoints, the papers will examine the institutional dimension of these processes. This involves understanding which organizational forms were involved in the construction and deconstruction of hierarchies.