From Samizdat to Blogging: Globalization and New Forms of Political Expression

20-21 February, 2008
OSA Archivum at OSA
Arany Janos utca 32.

On the first day of the workshop we will consider examples of both print culture and radio broadcasting during the Cold War era, and then compare the type of social networks forged by these practices with citizens' political mobilization via community radio, SMS, blogging, and participatory media. The second day will focus on the issue of political praxis, and we will question the utopic rhetoric that often accompanies the advent of web-based media. What kind of freedom does access to the internet allow, and does this bring with it a new space for alternative culture and/or effect political change?

In addition to the roundtables, on Wednesday evening at 18.00 the workshop will feature a keynote speech by Hossein Derakhshan, on "Blogging for what kind of change in Iran?"

In the interest of maintaining an informal setting while maximizing time for discussion, the workshop will consist of five roundtables instead of traditional panels. Each roundtable will feature several short presentations by selected participants as well as a general discussion. All participants of the workshop are encouraged to consult the website where focused discussion questions will be posted for each session.

Program

Wednesday, 20 February

9:30 Welcome & Introductions

OSA Archivum: István Rév
Central European University: Marsha Siefert (History), Arne Hintz (CMCS)
International Samizdat [Research] Association: Olga Zaslavskaya (OSA Archivum)
OSI-HESP ReSET “Alternative Culture Beyond Borders”: Jessie Labov (Stanford U)
OSI-HESP Challenge Seminar "Visual Studies of Immedia": Almira Ousmanova (EHU)
“From Samizdat to Blogging” Workshop: Barbara Falk (CFC)

10:00 -11:30 Session I: PRINT

Olga Zaslavskaya (OSA Archivum) / Barbara Falk (CFC)

This roundtable will focus on samizdat and tamizdat as social practices, looking more closely at how underground networks were established, maintained, and grew. Where can we see evidence of those networks in post-89 print culture and in other media? How is the legacy of samizdat being preserved and recorded in archives and other institutions? Does it provide any template for activists today? What do we do with the examples of so-called “bad” samizdat, i.e. racist, anti-semitic, and/or extreme nationalist publications that circulated underground during the Cold War but were overshadowed by the attention paid to the “mainstream” underground civil society movements? Do we consider this part of samizdat culture or a separate phenomenon (and is there any relationship between nationalist samizdat with analogous expressions in online environments, such as on LiveJournal in Russia)? Finally, this roundtable will highlight the gaps and incompatibilities between the ‘sub-world’ of dissent and the reality of the respective regimes in which secret police and propaganda, as well as the silent majority, played a significant and at times dominant role. Why did the message of the opposition fail to appeal to the majority in most cases and what are the implications of this ‘failure’ when we look for parallel movements in authoritarian environments today?

Victoria Harms (European U-Viadrina), "From where Samizdat Emerged: The Second Public in the GDR and Hungary"

Libora Oates-Indruchová (Masaryk U), "'Internal Samizdat'?: Academic Publishing and Communication in Czechoslovakia during So-Called Normalization (1969-89)"

Anna Piotrowska (Jagiellonian U), "Polish Roma (Re)presenting Themselves in the Roma Press"

Gorkem Akgoz (IISH), "Markopasa: An Early Example of Turkish Samizdat"

Alisher Sharipov (EHU), "Soviet Samizdat: Materialization of the Truth"

Ivor Stodolsky (Aleksanteri Insitute), “Samizdat Art”

11:30 Coffee

12:00-13:30 Session II: RADIO

Marsha Siefert (CEU) / Kate Coyer (CEU)

This roundtable will treat radio as a bridge between the “print” and “internet” era. We will begin by looking back to the point at which radio was a new medium, and brought with it the same excitement and utopic mindset that we see surrounding web-based practices today. We will reflect briefly on the early history of radio as it was transformed from a mode of point-to-point communication to broadcasting — and the role of amateur radio operators and other informal groups in developing listening communities. From these early experiences, we are interested in how and why radio continues to be of importance in promoting alternative culture—and alternative political practice—today. Institutions like Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty worked in an almost symbiotic relationship with the circulation of texts in samizdat and tamizdat. Does radio co-exist and complement the dissemination of information over the internet, particularly in censored environments, in much the same way (e.g., Radio B92 in the former Yugoslavia)? Do the listening practices established during the Cold War era in Eastern Europe leave any legacy in today’s media environment(s)? Why does radio remain such a vital medium for the expression of alternative culture today and how does this help us understand the transition to "broadcasting" a message in an online environment?

András Mink (OSA Archivum), "The Totalitarian Experience of Radio"

Victor Radchenko (EISES), "Independent Radio in Belarus"

Ekaterina Bezchagina (RFE/RL), "B92 from Radio to the Web"

Camelia Craciun (CEU), "Radio Free Europe as Political Alternative: Voicing Dissent"

13:30 – 15:00 Lunch

15:00– 17:00 Session III: TRUST

Jessie Labov (Stanford U) / Elizabeth Bucar (UNC-Greensboro)

Moving from the examples of print and radio, this roundtable will focus on the nature of trust in print vs. radio vs. online communities. When asking the question, “does samizdat exist on the web?” we are not just asking about the presence of specific texts which would be banned in specific political environments, but about the establishment of social networks dedicated to disrupting those political environments. Surveying some of the work that has been done on human-computer interface, we will first draw some distinctions between different types of online communities (weblogging, social utilities, participatory networks, smart mobs) that have gained attention for their potential for political mobilization. Do these forms of social interaction engender the same element of trust/friendship which was brought about by the face-to-face interaction at the core of samizdat and other underground networks? If we see samizdat activity as a series of “nested public events,” is this same activity possible on the web? For movements like samizdat to be successful, their message had to be disseminated through virtual communities as well (via transfer and reprinting of texts, via radio). Some aspect of trust was necessary for a particular radio station or journal to be effective in extending that social network. Is there really such a sharp line to be drawn between the virtual communities established during the Cold War and those on the web today?

Friederike Kind-Kovács (ZZF), "Trust between Samizdat and Tamizdat"

Tarana Mahmudova (Baku U), "New Forms of Political Expression in Azerbaijan"

Alla Pigalskaya (EHU), "The Disciplinary Dimension of Blogging. Belarus: Publicity through Blogging"

Helena Popović (U of Zagreb), "Audiences and Fan Practices"

Natia Sirabidze (Batumi U), "Credibility"

 

18:00-19:30 KEYNOTE: Hossein Derakhshan

"Blogging for what kind of change in Iran?"

Weblogs are more popular than anywhere in the Middle East. They have contributed to a Habermasian public sphere, where there is nothing too sacred to discuss. But unlike what many think or wish, this public sphere does not necessarily work against the Iranian government.

Hossein Derakhshan began as a print journalist writing about internet culture in Tehran before emigrating to Canada in 2001. There, he began his bilingual weblog "Sardabir: khodam," or "Editor: Myself," encouraging others both inside of Iran and in emigration to start their own blogs. Mr. Derakhshan is often credited with initiating the Persian blogging movement, AKA Weblogistan, and his own blog has been filtered by the Iranian government since 2004. Beyond speaking out against internet censorship (in 2003 he founded the site stop.censoring.us), Mr. Derakhshan has publicly taken political positions, such as traveling to Israel as a peace activist, and has loudly criticized the Bush administration’s aggressive stance towards Iran. In addition to maintaining his own blog in Persian and English (hoder.com/weblog/), he has a column in The Guardian (commentisfree.guardian.co.uk) and writes regularly for The Washington Post's Post Global section. He is currently pursuing a post-graduate degree with the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) at the University of London.

Respondent: Elizabeth Bucar (UNC-Greensboro), “Free Speech in Weblogistan? The Offline Consequences of Online Communication”

Chair: Barbara Falk (CFC)

19:30 Reception

Thursday, 21 February

9:30 Coffee

10:00 – 12:00 Session IV: INTER/ACTIVE/NET: POLITICS OF/ON the NET

Imre Szemán (McMaster U) / Miklós Sükösd (CEU Political Science) / Balázs Bodó (MOKK) / Arne Hintz (CEU CMCS) /

The advent of the Internet was initially viewed by both theorists and activists in an utopic fashion. It was imagined that the spread of electronic communications would bring about the long hoped for eclipse of national-cultural divisions; that political and alternative communities could more freely connect not only with one another but with the public at large; and that capitalism itself would be threatened by the new forms of identity and subjectivity brought into existence by the Net. Twenty years into the life of Internet, these hopes have given way to a more cautious, complex view of the Net and its alternative politics. If we look past the commercialism of parts of the Internet, there is certainly a plethora of alternative positions advocated on the web from a wide-range of perspectives. However, with some exceptions, these political energies have not resulted in broad-scale political change; if anything, capital seems to have extensified (complete proletarianization of labour) and intensified (biopower) its grip on earth. This roundtable which consider the role that the Internet has played, continue to plays and will play in the future for forms of alternative cultural and political expression.

Aleksandra Kleschina (Ekaterinburg State U), "The Public Position and Role of Russian Bloggers in the Development of Civil Society"

Viktor Martinovich (BSU), "Blogs that rule news-papers and TV: the Belarusian Case"

Ekaterina Lapina-Kratasyuk (Russian State U for the Humanities), "News in Contemporary Russia: TV vs. the Internet"

Alisa Prudnikova (NCAC, Yekaterinburg), "Where is Political Art in Russia Today and How Can Alternative Media help to construct it?"

Elena Strukova (RSHL): "Internet Resources and the 2007 Elections to the State Duma"

12:00 – 14:00 lunch

14:00– 16:00 Session V: FREEDOM

Barbara Falk (CFC) / András Bozóki (CEU) / Almira Ausmanova (EHU)

This roundtable focuses on the nature of freedom and political action in online communities. What kind of freedom to choose does access to the internet allow? If coalition building was the basis for all successful actions in Central and Eastern Europe, is this possible on the web (and is being a member of a coalition a kind of virtual community anyway)? Can online communities be a source of liberation/freedom for those in social isolation? Is there a difference between turning to the internet for exchange of information (as we see in political crises where media is shut down, i.e. Pakistan, Burma, or on a longer-term basis in China) and using it for freedom of expression in a censored environment (blogging in Iran)?

Natalia Sokolova (Samara State University), "Popular Culture and the Politics of Resistance in the New Media Age"

Natalia Koulinka (Belarus State U), "Gender Modeling in Traditional Print Media and Blogging"

Hajrudin Hromadzić (U of Zagreb), "New Perspectives of the Media Public"

Dzmitri Karenka (EHU), "Subversive Political Communication: the Medium or the Message?"

Viktoriya Kanstantsiuk (EHU), "New Media and New Forms of Subjectivity and Publicity"

16:30 Reception

Event is organized and supported by: OSA Archivum at CEU; International Alternative Culture Center (IACC), Center for Media and Communications Studies (CMCS) and the Curriculum Resource Center (CRC) of Central European University (CEU); OSI-HESP ReSET “Alternative Culture Beyond Borders” and Challenge Seminar “Visual Studies of Immedia”; International Samizdat [Research] Association.

Keynote speaker:

Hossein Derakhshan (U London-SOAS) began as a print journalist writing about internet culture in Tehran before emigrating to Canada in 2001. There, he began his bilingual weblog "Sardabir: khodam," or "Editor: Myself," encouraging others both inside of Iran and in emigration to start their own blogs. Mr. Derakhshan is often credited with initiating the Persian blogging movement, AKA Weblogistan, and his own blog has been filtered by the Iranian government since 2004. Beyond speaking out against internet censorship (in 2003 he founded the site stop.censoring.us), Mr. Derakhshan has publicly taken political positions, such as traveling to Israel as a peace activist, and has loudly criticized the Bush administration’s aggressive stance towards Iran. In addition to maintaining his own blog in Persian and English (hoder.com/weblog/), he has a column in The Guardiancommentisfree.guardian.co.uk) and writes regularly for The Washington Post's Post Global ( section. He is currently pursuing a post-graduate degree at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) at the University of London. This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it

Organizers:

Barbara Falk (CFC, Canada) holds a BA in Political Science from the University of Victoria, a MA and PhD from York University, and an MSL (Master of Studies in Law) from the University of Toronto. She is the Director of Academics and Head of Defence Studies at the Canadian Forces College in Toronto. Barbara has been teaching post-secondary education for the last 10 years, most recently at the Munk Centre for International Studies at the University of Toronto, where she is a Fellow of the Centre for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies and teaches in the MA International Relations Programme. Dr. Falk’s areas of research and teaching specialization include contemporary political philosophy; Cold War history; the politicization of justice; theories of war and terrorism; post-9/11 debates on international humanitarian law and the law of armed conflict; comparative security and terrorism law; contemporary public policy in Canada,, the United States, and Central and Eastern Europe; paradigms of transitional justice; and debates regarding globalization and global governance. In 2002 she published the first thorough and comparative account of dissident theory and activism under communism, entitled The Dilemmas of Dissidence in East-Central Europe: Citizen Intellectuals and Philospher-Kings. This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it

Jessie Labov (Stanford U, USA) is a Lecturer in the Department of Comparative Literature at Stanford University. She received her PhD in Comparative Literature at New York University in 2004. Her thesis was on the emigre movement to reinvent the concept of "Central Europe" in the 1980s. At Stanford she teaches courses in Comparative Literature ("Literatures of the New Europe"), German Studies ("The Austro-Hungarian Grotesque") and Slavic Studies ("The Gogol Bordello: Ukraine as a Meeting House of Cultures"). Jessie also initiated a research group at Stanford on "The Open Source Canon" which explores the possible connections between canon formation and open source systems. For the last three years, she has been a co-organizer of an international project on cross-border publishing, which culminated in the conference "From Samizdat to Tamizdat: Dissident Media Crossing Borders Before and After 1989" in September 2006 in Vienna, Austria. She has written on Polish film, Yugoslav popular culture, and collective authorship from encyclopedias to wikis. Ongoing publishing projects include a book manuscript entitled Transatlantic Central Europe, an edited volume of essays on Samizdat and Tamizdat, and a book project on European film called Projecting Beyond the Curtain. This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it

Imre Szeman (McMaster U, Canada) is Senator William McMaster Chair of Globalization and Cultural Studies at McMaster University. He is author of Zones of Instability: Literature, Postcolonialism and the Nation (2003) and co-author of Popular Culture: A User's Guide (Nelson, 2004; second edition forthcoming), and co-editor of Pierre Bourdieu: Fieldwork in Culture (2000), the Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism (2005, chosen as one the outstanding academic books of 2005 by Kirkus Review and Choice), Global-Local Consumption (2008) and Canadian Cultural Studies: A Reader (forthcoming). Current projects include Cultural Theory: An Anthology, and a book on the cultural politics of contemporary anti-Americanisms around the world. This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it

Olga Zaslavskaya (CEU OSA Archivum, ISRA, Hungary) joined the OSA as an archivist for Slavic languages and Samizdat archives curator in 1996. From 1987-1993 she taught courses on philosophy, social sciences and aesthetics in universities of the Altai region. She has taken an active part in organizing several exhibitions, including Forced Labour Camps (GULAG), Prague 1968 and The TypeWriter Exhibition on samizdat and has participated in the organization of the Curriculum Resource Center sessions in cooperation with CEU History Department. She has been an essential contributor to the establishment of the IS[R]A network and since September 2005 has been involved in strengthening the focus of OSA on the promotion of alternative culture. Her current research interests include problems of creativity and cognition, problems of alternative culture and the samizdat phenomenon. This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it

Moderators:

Balázs Bodó (MOKK, Hungary), economist, assistant lecturer, researcher at the Budapest University of Technology and Economics, Department of Sociology and Communications, Center for Media Research and Education since 2001. Fulbright visiting researcher at Stanford Law School. Non-residential fellow at the Center for Internet and Society at Stanford in 2006-2007. Project leader for Creative Commons Hungary.
His academic interests include the socio-cultural impacts of new media, media regulation, online communities, copyright piracy, peer-to-peer file sharing communities, underground libraries and digital archives. Has led the development of several commercial Internet applications as well as numerous academic research projects dealing with digital archives, e-learning and online communities. Editor and member of the board (2004-2006) of the Budapest-based community radio Tilos. This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it

András Bozóki (CEU Political Science, Hungary) research interests include topics in comparative politics (democratization, models of democracy, East Central European politics and the European Union), theories of political change (forms of revolutionary and evolutionary changes), elite theories, and the role of intellectuals. His books in this field include Confrontation and Consensus: Strategies for Democratization; Political Pluralism in Hungary, 1987-200; Post-Communist Transition: Emerging Pluralism in Hungary and Democratic Legitimacy in Post-Communist Societies in English. He served as the associate editor of Lawful Revolution in Hungary, 1989-94 (Boulder: Social Science Monographs and Columbia University Press, 1995). Recently he co-authored a book, Migrants, Minorities, Belonging, and Citizenship: The Case of Hungary (Bergen: BRIC, 2004). He has been also doing research in elite change, symbolic politics, and the interaction between political and cultural elites. He edited a book on Intellectuals and Politics in Central Europe (Budapest – New York: CEU Press, 1999. András Bozóki is elected member of the Executive Council of the European Political Science Network (epsNet), and member of the editorial associates of the quarterly journal, European Political Science. Since 2003, he is the Chairman of the Hungarian Political Science Association [HPSA]. This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it

Elizabeth Bucar (University of North Carolina at Greensboro, USA), assistant professor of religious studies with a teaching and research focus on Islam and comparative religious ethics. Current research focuses on an essay on the offline political and religious consequences of blogging in the Islamic Republic of Iran and a book manuscript tentatively titled "Creative Conformity: Feminist Politics of American Catholic and Iranian Shii Women." Resident Fellow, Institute for Women's Studies and Research, Tehran, Iran in 2004. Postdoctoral Fellow, Berkley Center for Religion, Peace and World Affairs, Georgetown University, Washington, DC, 2006-2007. Resident fellow the University of North Carolina at Greensboro's Center for Critical Inquiry in the Liberal Arts (http://www.uncg.edu/cci), participating in a workshop titled "Seeking Wisdom in the Ages of Digital Reproduction." The year-long workshop will culminate in an edited volume addressing how media breakthroughs have radically altered human life. This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it

Kate Coyer (CEU CMCS, Hungary), PhD is post-doctoral research fellow with the Center for Global Communication Studies at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania and the Center for Media and Communication Studies at Central European University (CEU). She teaches courses in global media, civil society and resistance at both universities. Kate received her PhD from Goldsmiths College, University of London in 2006. Her PhD research was a comparative study of community radio in Britain and the U.S., and she is currently examining community broadcasting policies across Europe.
She is an occasional contributor to the alternative news site Indymedia.org and London’s Resonance FM, and has conducted radio production workshops and training in many parts of the world. She has been producing radio and organising media campaigns for the past twenty years and has helped build community radio stations in the US and Tanzania with the Prometheus Radio Project. She serves on the Steering Committee of the Radio Studies Network. Her recent publications include the Handbook of Alternative Media (co-edited, Routledge, 2007), chapters in Battleground: the Media (Greenwood Press, 2007), Global Media, Global Activism (Pluto, 2005), and News Inc: Corporate Media Ownership and its Threat to Democracy (co-authored with Pete Tridish), and a policy brief on community radio in the journal Global Media and Communications.
You can read her journal account of the station-building project in Tanzania at: www.prometheusradio.org/tanzania.shtml
This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it

Arne Hintz (CEU CMCS, Hungary) is Program Director of the Center for Media and Communication Studies (CMCS) at Central European University (CEU), Budapest. Before, he was a research fellow at the Research Centre Media and Politics at the University of Hamburg. He studied Economics, Political Science and International Political Economy at the Universities of Hamburg, Germany, and Warwick, UK, and he holds a PhD in Political Science. He has worked as a journalist and with start-up Internet services, and he has been a media activist with alternative online media, community radio and media campaigns such as Communication Rights in the Information Society (CRIS). He participated as a community media expert in the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS), and he is a Board member of the Community Media Forum Europe. Arne Hintz is a member of several international research associations and collaborations, including the OURMedia network and the International Association for Media and Communication Research (IAMCR), and he is on the Steering Committee of the IAMCR's Global Media Policy WorkingGroup. Arne's core research interests are media and communication policy, global governance, community/alternative/activist media, civil society and social movements. This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it

István Rév (CEU OSA Archivum, Hungary) was born in Hungary and studied at Eötvös Loránd and York Universities. He has worked on the economic history of the post-World War II period, and his narrower field of research is historical anthropology. He has been a visiting professor at the University of California, Berkeley. He has been actively involved in ecological issues and published numerous articles criticizing the environmental damage caused by centralized economic planning. Rév was a founding member of the “Danube Circle”, a past winner of the Right for Livelihood award (the alternative Nobel Prize) of the Swedish Parliament. He was a fellow of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and was a research fellow at the Getty Center in Los Angeles. He is one of the editors of The Budapest Review of Books. In 1995 he was the recipient of the New Europe Prize.
He is a professor in the CEU History and Political Science departments, the director of the Open Society Archives, the chair of the Open Society Institute (OSI)-Information Sub-Board, member of the OSI Board of Directors. His most recent works include The Paradoxes of Unintended Consequences (CEU Press 2000) and Retroactive Justice - Prehistory of Post-Communism (Stanford University Press, Stanford, California, 2005). This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it

Marsha Siefert (CEU History, Hungary) is a communications and cultural historian. Her several edited books, research and teaching have encompassed international communication issues from Cold War culture to systems of cultural production, with attention to communications technology and music. She was the editor of the international peer-review Journal of Communication (circulation 7,500); over 4,000 manuscripts were reviewed and over 70 theme issues were published during her editorial tenure. She also co-edited two book series, Longman Communication Books (23 vols.) and Communication and Society (15 vols., Oxford UP) and has twice been a fellow at Oxford University. Her most recent publications include: "Twentieth-Century Culture, "Americanization," and European Audiovisual Space," in Konrad Jarausch and Thomas Lindenberger, eds. Conflicted Memories: Europeanizing Contemporary Histories (New York 2007), 164-193, „Russische Leben, Sowjetische Filme: Die Filmbiographie, Tchaikovsky und der Kalte Krieg," in Lars Karl, ed. Leinwand zwischen Tauwetter und Frost Der osteuropäische Spiel- und Dokumentarfilm im Kalten Krieg (Berlin 2007), 133-170, "From Cold War to Wary Peace: American Culture in the USSR and Russia," in Alexander Stephan, ed. The Americanization of Europe: Culture, Diplomacy and Anti-Americanism After 1945 (New York 2006), 185-217, as well as two edited collections, Extending the Borders of Russian History: Essays in Honor of Alfred J. Rieber (2003) and Mass Culture and Perestroika in the Soviet Union (1991). This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it

Miklós Sükösd (CEU Political Science, CMCS, Hungary) is Associate Professor at the Department of Political Science, and Academic Director of the Center for Media and Communication Studies at CEU. His teaching and research focuses on democatization of the media and alternative media. For eleven years he has been collaborating with curators of the OSA Archivum samizdat collection in organizing annual seminars for CEU graduate students about samizdat. In 2005, Miklós was elected Chair of COST Action 30, a network of 70 European media researchers from 27 countries in a project supported by the European Science Foundation between 2005-2009: "East of West: Setting a New Central and Eastern European Media Research Agenda." He has published 18 academic books, including Anarchism in Hungary: Theory, History, Legacies (2006) and Reinventing Media: Media Policy Reform in East Central Europe (2003). List of the courses (including Alternative Media) taught http://www.ceu.hu/polsci/sukosd.html. More about Center for Media and Communication Studies at CEU http://www.cmcs.ceu.hu/, and COST Action 30 http://www.costa30.eu/. This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it

Participants:

Gorkem Akgoz (Hacettepe U, Turkey) is a Ph D candidate at State University of New York at Binghamton, Department of Sociology. She received her Master's degree from the same university in 2005. She got her bachelor's degree from Middle East Technical University, Department of Sociology in 2003. Her areas of interests are historical sociology and political economy of culture. Right now, she is conducting archival research at International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam for her dissertation project titled 'Rethinking Proletarianization through the Turkish Case: A Social History of Proletarianization under Etatism.' The project aims to shed light on the social history of the proletarianization process during the early Republican era in Turkey by linking two fields of study: political economy and cultural studies. This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it

Ekaterina Bezgachina (RFE-RL, Moscow, Russia) holds an M.A. in European Studies and International Relations from CEU and an M.A. in Journalism from Goldsmiths College, University of London. Ekaterina has been working in the media over 7 years. She started as a researcher at the Voice of America Moscow bureau, then lived for a few years in Belgrade and reported about the Balkans for the BBC Russian service. Ekaterina led the development of the Anticorruption Resource Center of Transparency International in Moscow and its on-line library. Now she works as a news editor for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty Moscow bureau. She studied the work of opposition radio B92 in the former Yugoslavia. Her areas of research include: political communication, social and political impact of new media in the countries under transition, use of internet by opposition groups, blogging, the public sphere. This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it

Camelia Craciun (Collegium Budapest, Hungary) has studied literature and history at Brasov, Bucharest and Budapest. She was previously teaching assistant at the University of Brasov and a cultural journalist working for various publications in Romania. She is currently working on her Ph.D. thesis on Jewish Romanian intellectual history in the interwar period and for the 2006-2007 academic year she was a Chevening Scholar at the Oriental Institute, University of Oxford. She is also a contributor to the The YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe, ed. Jeffrey Edelstein and Gershon David Hundert, editors, Yivo Institute for Jewish Research and McGill University (forthcoming). At Collegium Budapest, she is working on a collective project concerning Eastern European exile literature, focusing on the activity of Radio Free Europe. This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it

Jakob Fruchtmann (U of Bremen) holds an M.A. in Eastern Slavistics and Economy (University of Hamburg) and a PhD in political science (University of Bremen). He has worked for two years as a Humboldt-fellow at the institute of sociology at the academy of science in Moscow and was active in research and teaching at the Universities of Bremen and Mainz. Since April 2007 he is a research fellow at the Research Centre for East European Studies [Forschungsstelle Osteuropa] at the University of Bremen. Dr. Fruchtmann focuses on research in the analysis of political language, discourse, and economic/politicalculture of Transformation with a strong focus on Russia. This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it

Victoria Harms (European U-Viadrina, Germany) is a doctoral student and research assistant at the Faculty of Cultural and Social Sciences of the Europa University Viadrina, from where in April 2006 she had obtained her BA degree. She finished her MA studies in Contemporary History at the Central European University in Budapest in 2007. Her BA thesis compared approaches to collective memory in Pierre Nora's Lieux de memoire and its German counterpart Deutsche Erinnerungsorte by contrasting the cases of Verdun and Tannenberg/ Grunwald. The Hungarian commemorative policies of 1956 attracted her attention to the Hungarian Revolution's anniversary, hence, she set these into the larger context of memorial discourses in her MA thesis. With this topic she also participated in the international postgraduate conference "Upheavals of memory. Defining, Imagining, Creating, Contesting" at the UCD Humanities Institute of Ireland, Dublin. Currently, she works on dissident movements in the GDR and Hungary from the late 1970s until the transition period. This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it

Hajrudin Hromadzić (U of Zagerb, Croatia) received his PhD in the Anthropology of Everyday Life and Media Studies in 2004. Currently, he collaborates as a teacher with the Department of Media Studies at the Institutum Studiorum Humanitatis (ISH) / Graduate School of Humanities, Ljubljana, Slovenia and with the Department of Sociology at the Faculty of Art, Zagreb, Croatia. He has published numerous scientific articles in the fields of media and cultural studies. His fields of academic interest include media anthropology and new media technologies, the anthropology of consumerism, the anthropology of everyday life, and cultural studies. This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it

Tim Kaposy (Bonn U, Germany), PhD. After graduating from the University of Western Ontario's Centre for the Study of Theory and Criticism in 2003, he pursued doctoral studies in the Department of English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University. His dissertation, "An Ensemble of Need: On the Scale and Visual Culture of Dispossession" (completed 2008) examines the ways in which: (a) contemporary organizations of space and scale play a central role in the management of social, political, and economic needs, and (b) histories and practices of visual culture are a necessary way of 'making public' the processes whereby needs are expropriated from populations. Currently he is a visiting professor in the North American Studies Program at Bonn Universitat, and in August of 2008 he will join the cultural studies department at George Mason University. His research interests include critical theory, cultural studies, theorists and novels of Weltliteratur, and psychoanalytic theory. This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it

Dzmitry Karenka (EHU, Belarus), Culture Studies from the European Humanities University (Minsk), M.A. degree in Culture and Society from the Center for Social Studies (Lancaster). In 2004-2006, he was a participant in the HESP project "Re-Thinking Cultural and Visual Studies" (http://www.viscult.by.com/). In 2006-2007, was a visiting researcher at Southwestern College (Winfield, Kansas). Currently, he is working as a co-editor for the Belarusian electronic magazine "Novaja Europa" (New Europe), http://n-europe.eu, and teaching a course at EHU on "The Phenomenon of Tourism in the Context of the Social and Critical Theory." Dzmitry is a participant in the 'Alternative Culture' HESP project. His broader academic interests include the problematic of mobility within contemporary social theory, visual studies, the interconnections between new media studies, critical investigations of social space, urbanism. Also, he is trying to find both theoretical and practical tools to explore possibilities of alternative political communication under conditions of authoritarian culture. This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it

Friederike Kind-Kovács (ZZF, Potsdam) is currently finishing her Ph.D. dissertation in contemporary history (co-supervised at the Zentrum für Zeithistorische Forschung (ZZF), Potsdam and the Central European University (CEU), Budapest) on the transfer of underground literature to the West during the Cultural Cold War, so-called Tamizdat. Her work is entitled: “Out of the drawer and into the West: Tamizdat from the Other Europe and the vision of an all-European community of letters (1956-1989).” She has been a co-organizer of the conference „From Samizdat to Tamizdat” at the Institut für die Wissenschaften (IWM) in Vienna in September 2006 as a collaborative project between samizdat-researchers of the ZZF, the IWM, the CEU, Stanford University, the OSA and in particular of ISRA. She is the German coordinator of ISRA. She received her master’s degree in contemporary history from St. Andrews University, Scotland. Her research interests embrace underground and émigré literature, media during the Cold War, Literary nonconformism. As a new project she is planning a three-year postdoc on “The Biennale del Dissenso (Venice 1977) as a space for cultural encounters between East and West“, starting from 01/2009. Recent/forthcoming publications include an edited volume, From Samizdat to Tamizdat. Independent Media Crossing borders before and after 1989 (forthcoming,) and several articles: “Independent media crossing borders in l’Ancien Régime France and Cold War Europe," (forthcoming); "An 'Other Europe' through Literature: Recreating a European literary 'Kontinent' after Helsinki," in: Jose Faraldo/Paulina Gulinska-Jurgiel/Christian Domnitz, Europa im Ostblock. Vorstellungen und Diskurse (1945-1991), Köln, Wien: Böhlau Verlag (forthcoming); review of Catherine Andreyev and Ivan Savický Russia Abroad. Prague and the Russian Diaspora, 1918-1938, Yale 2004, Archiv für Sozialgeschichte 2006; "Vom Untergrund in den Westen: Samizdat, Tamizdat und die Neuerfindung Mitteleuropas in den achtziger Jahren," with Jan Behrends, in: Archiv für Sozialgeschichte, 45, 2005, p.427-448. This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it

Aleksandra Kleschina (Ural State U, Yekaterinburg, Russia) is a researcher in the theory and history of Cultural Studies; assistant lecturer at Ural State University, Department of Art History and Cultural Studies; Chair of Cultural Studies. Her academic interests include the problem of multiculturalism in light of the contemporary American cultural situation and with respect to the contemporary situation in Russia; inter-ethnic, inter-national and inter-cultural relationships in Russia related to globalization and the collapse of the USSR and with a focus on intercultural communication studies and the problems of intercultural sensitivity and competence development; the problem of identity, its crisis and construction, in the context of liquid modernity. This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it

Viktoriia Konstantiuk (EHU, Lithuania) is a lecturer at the Department of Media and Communication. September 1996 – July 2001 - Undergraduate studies at the Belarusian State University (Minsk, Belarus), Faculty of Philosophy and Social Science. She was a graduate student at European Humanities University (Minsk, Belarus), Faculty of Philosophy, program on History and Theory of Culture. Courses taught: Social and Cultural Anthropology, Psychoanalysis and Culture, Introduction into terminology in English (Visual and Cultural Studies). Viktoriya has been participating in the research seminars Rethinking Visual and Cultural Studies: new subjects, methods, and teaching strategies (HESP program) and the Conference on Visuality (Russian State Humanities University). Today she is involved in the development and realization of a new and unique program for the university of Low Residence and Distance Programs (coordinator of Low Residence and Distance Programs). Her academic interests include Psychoanalysis, Post-marxism, Critical Theory, Visual Studies, the socio-cultural impacts of new media, postmodern culture, consumer society and globalization. This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it

Natalia Koulinka (BSU, School of Journalism, Belarus), journalist, associate professor, trainer in print journalism. Academic interests include history and theory of Journalism (namely, print journalism) as a certain type of discourse and on-line communities. Natalia specializes in ways of representing women's experience in print press and within on-line communities. This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it

Ekaterina Lapina-Kratasiuk (RGGU, Moscow, Russia), PhD, is a professor in Russian State University for the Humanities and a senior researcher in Russian Institute for Culturology (RIK, Moscow, Russia). Her research as well as teaching interests are connected with media studies, history and theory of cinema, Internet studies and cultural sociology. The most significant of her publications are dedicated to the constructing of "Reality" in TV and Internet news, sociological analysis of commercials, representation of Past in popular culture. The topic of her actual research is connected with images and meanings of "Science" in mass media. She is a member of editorial board of electronic journal Russian CyberSpace.org, dedicated to Russian Internet studies. She is also a part of international HESP challenge seminar "Visual Studies of Immedia: Exploring postmodern immediacy of mass media" (2007-2009). After obtaining her Ph.D. she took part in a number of international projects and conferences, "Russian-cyberspace.org: The processes of recreating of Russian identity in RuNet" (funded by Volkswagenstiftung), "Cosmologies of History" (CEU), XXI International Arthurian Conference (Utrecht, Netherlands) etc. are among them. This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it

Terana Mahmudova (BSU, Azerbaijan), PhD, a lecturer, researcher at the Baku State University, School of Journalism, Department of International Journalism. After graduating from the Baku State University in 1991, she pursued post-graduate studies in the Department of TV and Radio Journalism. In 1999 defended her doctoral (PhD) dissertation titled "The Language of Television." Her academic interests include coverage of diversity in the media, women issues in the media, global information interchange, and TV and radio in information society. Regularly participates in international conferences, sessions and workshops on media issues. This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it

Viktor Martinovich (BSU, Belarus), tutor, editor, critic. Member of Belarussian Association of Journalists. Deputy editor-in-cheif of Belgazeta weekly (web: www.belgazeta.by). Belgazeta is the biggest independent print media focused on topics of policy, economy and culture. Despite the main concern of most issue of Belgazeta being inner Belarussian situation, it also covers European and wider international topics. Since Belarus is known for the very specific attitude of its rulers to the issue of freedom of the press, Belgazeta has no competitors and is recognized as media phenomena. Viktor works as a lecturer at the European Humanities University. Courses taught: Art and media: evolution of relations (XIX-XX cent), Master classes of contemporary journalism. Currently working on PhD entitled "Representation of Vitebsk's avant-garde in Soviet press of 1920-s." Participant of more that 10 conferences on media topics. Academic interests include representation of art in media, problem of "mediatization of art", topics related with media and communication. This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it

András Mink (CEU OSA Archivum, Hungary) PhD, is historian, research arhvisit at OSA Archivum, CEU. Main fields: history of the Cold War, the Soviet bloc, dissident movements and the regime change in 1989-91. Various publications on Janos Kadar, RFE/RL, 1956 revolution and its historiography. This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it

Libora Oates-Indruchová (Masaryk U, Czech Republic) is a professor at the Department of Sociology (Faculty of Social Studies). Her interest in feminist theory and gender studies began during her M.A. at Lancaster University in 1991-92. She was awarded a PhD at Lancaster University with the dissertation Discourses of Gender in Pre- and Post-1989 Czech Republic, which was published in 2002 under the same title. Dr. Oates-Indruchová is the editor of two anthologies of feminist theory, Dívčí válka s ideologií: klasické texty angloamerického feministického myšlení [The Girls' War against Ideology: Classics of Anglo-American Feminist Thought] (Praha: Slon, 1998) and Ženská literární tradice a hledání identit: antologie angloamerické feministické literární teorie [Women's Literary Tradition and the Search for Identities: an Anthology of Anglo-American Feminist Literary Theory] (Praha: Slon, 2007). She is now working on a book on academic publishing and censorship during the so-called Normalization (1969-89). She taught at Charles University, Pardubice University and Szeged University (Hungary), and held research fellowships and scholarships at the University of Toronto; Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, University of Edinburgh (Andrew Mellon Fellowship); Collegium Budapest/Institute for Advanced Study; and Central European University in Budapest (Doctoral Student Support Scholarship). This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it

Anna Piotrowska (Jagiellonian U, Poland), PhD, has studied musicology at Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Poland and Durham University in the United Kingdom. She also pursued her post-graduate studies at the Center for American Studies at Jagiellonian University. In 2002 she defended her PhD on the idea of nationalism in American music. She is an associate professor in the Chair of Theory and Anthropology of Music at the Institute of Musicology, Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Poland. Her primary interest lies in the sociological and cultural aspects of musical life. Currently she is working on a project entitled “Stereotype of Gypsy Music in European Culture”. Anna Piotrowska has actively participated in many international conferences in Copenhagen, Vilnius, Tbilisi, Kraków, among others. She was awarded several fellowships from universities in the United Kingdom as well as from the Central European University in Budapest. She is the author of the book The Idea of National Music in the Works of American Composers of the Early Twentieth Century and has written about thirty articles (in both Polish and English) on musical culture. This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it

Helena Popović (U of Zagreb, Croatia) graduated from the Department of Sociology in the Faculty of Philosophy in Zagreb (2004) and holds an M.A. in Sociology and Social Anthropology from the Central European University in Budapest (2005). She also completed a one-year programme at the Centre for Women's Studies in Zagreb (2003). Helena is currently employed as a teaching assistant at the Department of Journalism in the Faculty of Political Science, University of Zagreb. She is involved in the courses Introduction to Media Systems and Entertainment Genres in Popular Culture. She also works on the project Media Culture in Contemporary Croatia: Pluralism of the Media and Media Policies, which is financed by the Ministry of Science, Education and Sports in Croatia. She was previously employed as a research fellow at the Department for Culture and Communication, Institute for International Relations on the project Media, Communication and the Cultural Aspects of Civil Society (2004-2007). In this period, she also worked on several research projects on media policy in Croatia.
Her research interests, in a broad sense, include media and communication and media anthropology, and more specifically, audience reception, entertainment genres, visual communication and gender representation in the media. Helena is a member of the CEU Alumni Association and the Croatian Sociological Association.
Foreign languages: English, Swedish, German. This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it

Alisa Prudnikova (National Centre for Contemporary Arts, Yekaterinburg, Russia), art theorist, curator, critic. Member of the Art Critics and Art Historians Association (AIS). Editor-in-Chief of ZAART, a magazine for the creators and consumers of art which is dedicated to the analysis of the cultural situation in the Ural region. As an independent and conceptual magazine ZAART serves as a forum for contemporary discourses. Works as an assistant lecturer at the Ural State Gorky University, Department of Art History and Cultural Studies. Courses taught: Introduction to Contemporary Art, Project Management in Cultural Organizations. Currently working on PhD entitled "Representation and Technological Mediation of the Body in Art." She is curator of numerous local and international art projects; organizer of and participant in more than 10 international conferences. Her academic interests include new technologies in art, the artist's body, media, performance, bioart, new aesthetics, tolerance, problems of national and local identity, public art strategies, creative industries, and contemporary art institutions, missions, objectives and strategies of development. Since 2005 has been the director of the Yekaterinburg Branch of the National Centre for Contemporary Arts (Russia). This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it

Viktor Radchenko (European Institute for Social and Economic Studies, Donetsk, Ukraine) journalist, assistant professor and senior lecturer at EISES. He teaches Alternative Media, Macroeconomics, Microeconomics, Public Policy. He got his masters degree in Economics from Donetsk National University (Ukraine) in 1997. His M.A. in Public Policy is from the Hubert H. Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs (USA) in 2004. Viktor works as a consultant on several media projects. He also works as a journalist with the international magazine EON, writes for other online and offline magazines. Among his interests are alternative media, public policy, economics, activism, new media, etc. This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it

Natia Sirabidze (BSU, Georgia) is a lecturer at Batumi State University named after Shota Rustaveli, Department of Social Science, Business and Law. Her teaching subjects are media management, Marketing and Public Relations at the Bachelors level; Media Management (Press) at the Masters level. In 2007 she founded the Univeristy Radio “Chven” (meaning “Us”) that broadcasts inside the university during 10 minute breaks. The Radio has different programs and all of them are prepared by students in the journalism department. Ms. Sirabidze got her Masters degree in Journalism and Media Management at the Caucasus School of Journalism and Media Management, Georgian Institute of Public Affairs. Natia has traveled in Western countries preparing documentary TV programs and researching the media organizations’ structure, learning new methods of teaching Media Management.
This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it

Natalia Sokolova (SSU, Russia), PhD, is a Professor in the Sociology Department at Samara State University. She graduated from the Postgraduate Department at Moscow State University. She teaches courses for students specializing in the field of a mass communication and sociology of culture: "Sociology of Culture", "Sociology of Mass-communication", "Introduction to Cultural and Visual Studies", "Advertising as a Way to Design Social Reality", and "Gender and Popular culture: Modern Research Approaches." She has led numerous workshops and master-classes for the journalist and advertising-specialists in the Volga Federal district. She also works as an expert for Russian advertising production. Her academic interests include: aestheticism in everyday life; correlation of aesthetics and politics in social life; recent transformations in popular culture; visual and media studies as related to the aestheticization phenomenon. She is a participant in the HESP two-year project "Visual Studies of Immedia: Exploring Postmodern Immediacy of Mass Media". This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it

Ivor Stodolsky (Alexanteri Institute, U of Helsinki, Finland) is Researcher at the Aleksanteri Institute, University of Helsinki. Editor and research assistant for the European Studies Centre of Helsinki University (2003-4); talks/teaching/ conference presentations at art and academic instutions in Finland, Russia, Hungary, France, Turkey,Estonia, Austria; articles readied for publication in Moscow, Helsinki, Paris, Pristina, New York. Previously: MRes with Prof. Paul Hirst at the LondonConsortium (Birkbeck College, The British Film Institute, The Architectural Association, The Tate Gallery; Lecturer: University of St. Petersburg (English Literature); BA in Joint School of Philosophy and Mathematics (Bristol 1995). Associate Editor, Project Syndicate (Global political op-ed service: http://www.project-syndicate.org/); Curator of the GG, St.Petersburg; Organization of various literary/academic/art projects in London, Vienna, Linz, Prague, Helsinki and St. Petersburg; President of Birkbeck College, University of London Student Union.Most recently, he was chief organizer of a series of events dedicated to the Perestroika-era, including, a multi-part exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Kiasma “The Raw, The Cooked and the Packaged” (The Archive of Perestroika Art); a major academic conference 7th Annual Aleksanteri Conference “Revisiting Perestroika: Processes and Alternatives”; a film series at the Finnish National Film Archive; “Glasnost'” an exhibition at the FinnishNational Library; and a new edition of Framework, The Finnish Art Review. This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it

Elena Strukova (SHPL, Russia) is head of the sector of nontraditional press at the State Historical Public Library since 1993. Since 1989 she has been engaged in the formation and processing of the collection which is the largest collection of the materials concerning the history from the last quarter of XX century till the present time. She is the author of more than 20 publications on problems of examination, ordering and storage of documentary fund. Among her works there are scientific articles, statements at the conferences, bibliographic indexes, publications of documents, the scientific monography. This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it

Ekaterina Taratuta (St.Petersburg State U, Russia), PhD, philosopher, philologist, writer; senior lecturer in the Department of Philosophy and Political Sciences at the St. Petersburg State University since 2004; docent in the Department of Communication Technologies at the Nevskii Institute of Language and Culture since 2004. She is the author of academic books: The Y City. Semantics and Mythology of a Soviet Heliopolis (in progress, to be published by the Ibidem Verlag, Germany, in 2007-2008) (In English); Philosophy of Virtual Reality. St.Petersburg State University Publishing, 2007 (in Russian); and fiction books: Hundred and One Minutes. Publishing House “Krasnyj Matros”, St. Petersburg, 2007 (In Russian); Sasha Sauv (pseudonym). The General Hygiene by Dr. Andreas (forthcoming, Publishing House “Vector”, St. Petersburg) (In Russian); Fishes and Frogs (forthcoming in 2007) (in Russian). Her academic interests include the social philosophy of virtual reality, technologies and communications; languages of communications; social philosophy of cities and city semiotics. This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it

György Túry (U of Pécs, Hungary), PhD, is a graduate of Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest in English and Aesthetics, he is currently employed in the Department of English Literatures and Cultures at the University of Pécs and at the Institute of Journalism and Media Studies of the Budapest College of Communication and Business Studies. He has been a visiting fellow at the following institutions: the British Library, the J.F. Kennedy Institute in Berlin, the University of Oklahoma (Fulbright), UC Irvine, Columbia University (Fulbright) and Cornell University. His publications include book chapters and journal articles, both in English and in his native Hungarian. This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it