This course proposes a comprehensive and multidisciplinary analysis of the phenomenal appeal of ideas of nationalism, conservatism, and patriotism, usually accompanied by strong nostalgic emotional investments. This shift from a post-Cold War normative order based on principles of liberalism to a growing traction of illiberal, inward-oriented and largely anti-globalist ideas affects the whole West, but is particularly meaningful and consequential for Europe understood in a wider sense, as comprising the EU and countries of common EU-Russia neighbourhood. Of course, the nationalist U-turn takes different cultural, societal and political forms – from the resurgence of far-right parties in many of EU member states to the nostalgic Communism in some of post-Soviet countries, and needs fine-tuned contextualization that the course offers. It contains country-based case studies (Russia; Austria, Sweden and Estonia within the EU; Georgia and Ukraine among Eastern Partnership countries) that leave much room for cross-national comparisons and useful generalizations.

Deploying these cases in a broad spectrum of academic schools and approaches (from British cultural studies to cultural semiotics) each one having its merits, I, in the meantime, more specifically focus on biopolitical interpretations of nationalism, conservatism and patriotism both as concepts and practices that are produced, transferred and consumed as parts of never-ending nation-building mostly in Russia but also referring to post-Soviet countries such as Georgia, Estonia and Ukraine.

The biopolitical lens presupposes actualization of ideas developed, in particular, by Michel Foucault and Giorgio Agamben, and their extrapolation onto the current political and cultural developments.

The course will take place as an intensive course during spring term 2018, most likely in April.

Teaching will take place in the evening, except on Friday.

lectures + group work + learning diary

Dr. Alexandra Yatsyk is a Visiting Researcher,  Institute of Social Sciences, Vienna & Uppsala University, Sweden

The course is organized in cooperation with Aleksanteri Institute's Russian and East European Master's School.