Deadline: July 1, 2026
SYSTEMATIC DISORDER: RUSSIAN CULTURE UNDER NEOLIBERALISM
An international conference to be held on September 25-26, 2026,
at the Harriman Institute at Columbia University in New York
Organizers: Daria Ezerova (Cambridge), Mark Lipovetsky (Columbia),
and the Harriman Institute
Keynote: Masha Salazkina (Concordia)
Special Event: the launch of Russia’s New Imperialism: Capital and Ideology (Stanford University Press, forthcoming in September 2026) by Ilya Budraitskis and Ilya Matveev
For all participants, the Harriman Institute will cover travel expenses and a three-night stay in New York.
In the past few decades, a body of historical and theoretical work has emerged on neoliberalism that might radically alter our understanding of the decline and fall of the Soviet Union and the post-Soviet transition. It allows us to see beyond the narratives of the triumphant liberal world order of the 1990s, to read cultural shifts in relation to the transformation of the global economy from the crisis of the 1970s onward. Although the leadership of the late Soviet Union could not crush worker power, roll back the welfare state, deregulate financial markets, or enforce a new spirit of competitive individualism like their Western counterparts, they arguably already governed under the same straitened circumstances of the global economy after the oil shock. 1991 would provide the opportunity to finally shred the socialist state and turn its former citizens into faster guns than even those in the West. As communities held together by socialized labor, housing, and healthcare were torn apart, nationalism and conservatism, with their promises of the restoration of organic community, gained purchase.
Culture offers fertile ground on which to study how this economic and political project has been negotiated in everyday life. To use the concept that Ranajit Guja, one of the founders of Subaltern Studies, developed from Gramsci, the situation in Russia, as in the West, mutatis mutandis, is arguably one of “dominance without hegemony”, where neoliberalism holds sway at the level of the state, but its enthusiastic uptake remains uneven at best among the population, encountering resistance from older attachments. In this situation, art can take a number of different positions, meditating upon change while its own conditions of production are also transformed. This makes post-Soviet Russia, with its complex and even paradoxical cultural landscape, an important case study of culture and aesthetic mediation under neoliberalism.
This conference invites proposals for papers that explore late- and post-Soviet Russian culture through any of the rich and varied body of work on neoliberalism. To what extent is neoliberalism the “political unconscious” (Jameson) of post-Soviet culture? How does artistic form register neoliberal transformation of society, and, in turn, how does neoliberalism reshape aesthetics? How does Russian culture under neoliberalism fit with global tendencies?
We invite presentations that focus on literature, film, visual and performing arts, and popular media. Topics may include, but are not limited to:
- Rethinking Perestroika-era culture in a global context
- Nationalism and social conservatism as responses to the neoliberal turn
- The transformation of cultural institutions and the reconfiguration of artistic labour and value since 1991
- Representing the neoliberal subject
- Cultural resistance to neoliberalism
- Neoliberalism and genre
- Twenty-first-century Russian culture and the rise of the alt-right
- Neoliberalism, new imperialism, and the arts
- The dismantling of the welfare state as represented in post-Soviet literature and film
- Popular culture under neoliberalism
Please submit your abstracts to neoliberalismconference2026@gmail.com
Abstract submission deadline is July 1, 2026.