Ellen Rutten and the University of Florence organized this new lecture series:

New Histories of Public Spheres and Public Actions

Joint EUI, UvA Online Lecture Series,
organised by Profs. Alexander Etkind and Ellen Rutten

Established in 2020, this lecture series responds to the dramatic events of our time in a historical and humanistic perspective. Arguably, public action has rarely been more important and public protest more inspired, while the underlying public sphere has never been more fragmented. We will focus on the historical roots, cultural forms and political fruits of this peculiar combination. Exploring the public effects of digital media and the new awareness of Anthropocene, we will address the changing materialities and global roles of the new public. We will also examine local, gendered and other aspects of access, inclusivity, and retribution. Inviting historians, media scholars and other colleagues to this debate, we will create a new transnational community that will be instrumental in changing some inherited truths – and establishing new ones.

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Lecture 1: October 30, 3-5pm via Zoom
To attend this lecture: Please register here

Memory, Conflict and Post-Socialist Media: Old Stories, New Questions
Ellen Rutten

Between the early 2000s and today, readers of Russian and Ukrainian social media have found themselves embedded in a world of digital wars, where alternative histories thrive and multifarious memories compete for position. Bloggers quarrel over the roles that Ukraine and Russia played in World War II. Chatters on memory sites debate the role of remembrance in determining how present-day Russia differs from the Soviet Union. And participants of social-network groups discuss Soviet repressions in Ukraine. With its speed, accessibility, and accommodation of anonymity, new media platforms continue to change the way memory travels between generations and communities. In the early 2010s, the interconnection between historical memory and digital media was the topic of investigation of Web Wars, a research project on digital memory based at the University of Bergen. In this lecture, project leader Ellen Rutten both looks back on the project and forward, into the future of digital memory studies. Which new developments have demanded our attention after the mid-2010s, when the Web Wars research was concluded? Which new questions merit scrutiny today when web wars are no longer fought mostly on blogs, social media, and YouTube, but also on such newer platforms as Instagram and TikTok?

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Ellen Rutten is professor of Russian and Slavic Studies at the University of Amsterdam and editor-in-chief of the journal Russian Literature. She is project leader of the research project Sublime Imperfections: Creative Interventions in Post-1989 Europe (2015-2020) and author of Unattainable Bride Russia (Northwestern UP 2010), Memory, Conflict and New Media (Routledge 2013, ed. together with Julie Fedor and Vera Zvereva) and Sincerity after Communism (Yale UP 2017), among other works.