Author: Cara Keirstead

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.

Continue reading “CFP: Systematic Disorder: Russian Culture under Neoliberalism”