CFP: “The Past and Present of Russia's Public Sphere: Ethical and Political Perspectives”

Deadline: October 21, 2018 

We invite authors to contribute to a joint volume “The Past and Present of Russia's Public Sphere: Ethical and Political Perspectives”. The collection aims to reconstruct and trace the development of the public sphere and “regimes of publicity” in pre-revolutionary, Soviet, and post-Soviet Russia. Relying on major studies in this field by Russian and Western scholars, we propose a number of broad questions: Did a “public sphere” exist in Russia? If the answer is “yes”, which forms did it take and which functions did it perform? Did it align with attributes of autocracy and dictatorship, or rather with democratic elements in Russian society? Was its function purely representative (as per Habermas, represented “before” people by the ruling elite) or did it exist “for” people, involving the public in collaborative exchange with the state? Was there only one public sphere (the public) or can we say there were various public spheres (official, semiofficial, underground) and publics? Which spaces in Russia were historically envisioned as public? How did public discourses take shape in history and how did they relate to one another? How informative and productive is the concept of “regimes of publicity” from a historical perspective?

It is also essential to understand what Russia's contemporary public sphere has inherited from Soviet times and which aspects are entirely new to the present day. How have monologue-centered traditions of the Soviet publicity, news media monopolization, media glamorization and commercialization, the shrinking and re-emergence of spaces of competitive debate (including social media), new political propaganda and alternative rhetoric of public representation opposed to it, interacted to shape today’s Russia?

Methodologically, the editors set themselves two goals 1) apply and update the established “Western” conceptual tools for the public sphere studies in the Russian context 2) develop new analytical tools that consider the historical specifics of the public sphere in Russia, and offer this perspective for general scientific and public use.

The collection is planned for publication by Novoye Literaturnoye Obozreniye (New Literature Review) publishing house. An English-language version is envisioned by Routledge.

Please send proposals (titles and abstracts in Russian and in English) to tianavaizer@yandex.ru (Tatiana Weiser), timur.atnashev@gmail.com (Timur Atnashev, Mikhail Velizhev) by October 21, 2018.