Suchergebnisse

Ethnographic studies of youth subcultures, scenes and urban tribes often rely on insiders' accounts, where researchers investigate a social environment of which they are presently or formerly members. This approach raises important questions about the positionality of the researcher, and the reflexivity, epistemology and ethics of an ethnographic investigation, as different roles and engagement with the field, as well as the very identity of the 'field' itself, no longer fit into the methodological framework of traditional ethnography. This article explores the difficulties that arise during ethnographic research on one's own social world. I was actively involved in the Russian punk scene before pursuing my academic career in England, and in the framework of a research project on post-socialist punk at the University of Warwick, I went back to study this milieu as a 'field' in two different sites in 2009 and in 2010. The article shows the complexity of researching one's own subculture and demonstrates that active discentring of the 'knowing authority' in studying one's own 'tribe' necessarily involves a transformation of its main research paradigms, where epistemological and ethical issues appear to be rearranged in a new way which radically affects the methodological foundations of such an investigation.

Discourse analysis in both its theory and practice is traditionally concerned with politics. The sphere of the non-political rarely attracts attention of the researchers. It appears to be invisible to discourse theorists and unprivileged in empirical studies of discourse. This article aims at filling this gap. With the example of a Russian village it dwells on the discursive organisation of rural communities whose radically "personalised" world resists traditional approaches to political logic and suggests different modes of relations, agency, and power.

This working paper analyses the relationship between different forms of patriotic discourse and electoral support in Krasnodar kray. Two main forms of patriotic discourse are identified. One is labelled 'civil-patriotic', and the other 'national-patriotic'. In the civil-patriotic conception, Russian society is conceived of as a unified whole, encompassing numerous and diverse ethnic groups. In the national-patriotic conception, in contrast, Russian society is seen as divided between a good Russian core, and elements that threaten it, such as Jews, reformers, businesspeople or the West. This working paper argues that politicians who have espoused national-patriotic discourse have experienced greater electoral success than those who have drawn upon civil-patriotic discourse. ; publishedVersion