Suchergebnisse

The article is a detailed response to the text by Martin Müller "In Search for the Global East", written on the basis of the experience of a scientist specializing in post-socialist realities, and included in the global circulation of social and humanitarian knowledge. It deals with the possibility of reflection of the place of the post-socialist part of the world in the world as a whole, from the point of view of a community formed by those who live in the post-socialist space and those who explore different aspects of post-socialist life. The genealogy of discussions about the Global South and the Global North, which are fundamental for such disciplines as geography (political, economic, and human) and urban studies, as well as the formation of the conceptual link of "development = the global South" in the political history of the second half of the twentieth century and in the intellectual history of this period is discussed. It is argued that the Global South is actively discussed in the global debates of geographers, urbanists, and historians. It also occupies a prominent place in transnational, big stories about what is happening in the world, and with the world. At the same time, the post-socialist world (Müller proposes the name "Global East" for it) occupies an insignificant place in these narratives. "Development" (no matter how different and controversial it may be) in relation to that part of the "global" which is comprised from Eastern Europe, Russia, and Central Asia, is understood as a task of national governments, and which must be solved by following Western recipes. The article explains the reasons for the lack of understanding of what this region means today, as well as the difficulties of conducting and popularizing research about it, in particular, the ongoing post-colonial decentralization of the West as a privileged place of knowledge production. The conclusion of the article is that much more research is needed in which different perceptions of the global are compared, including the ones ...

This paper employs the multi-scalar approach towards mega-events (Flint, 2003; Peck, Theodore, and Brenner, 2009; Barret, 2013; and Trubina, 2019) to examine the results of fieldwork conducted in Ekaterinburg in the spring and summer of 2018, namely before, during, and after the 2018 World Cup. The multi-scalar approach allows the consideration of how the supra-local and supranational processes crystallize in complex urban systems, and their connections with other systems. The article addresses the question of the dynamics of the global, the national, and the local scales in the implementation and perception of the mega-event. Since the existing studies of the World Cup in Russia tend, as a rule, to focus on isolated topics and the national scale of the event's preparation, the article expands the focus of existing research. It demonstrates "the game of scales" in the citizens' perceptions of the World Cup. They, on the one hand, consider this mega-event as a part of the national strategy of development, including seeking investment, while on the other, they are aware that it is the transnational players (FIFA) and the federal and regional governments that predominantly benefit from the event. The authors argue that the respondents' judgements, on the one hand, are strongly informed by nationalist and geopolitical propaganda, while on the other hand, stem from the respondents' understanding of the global influences and the significance of economic logic, including the importance of the branding of the nations and cities. The citizens see both the political strategy devised to "force to show respect" and the economic driver of the national and urban growth in the mega-events. They, at the same time, are aware that it is the citizens who will be paying for the sporting festival with their taxes. The mega-events are ambiguous undertakings: while potentially open and bringing joy to everyone, they facilitate a social and geographic inequality. © 2020 National Research University Higher School of Economics.

Global urbanism tends to think cities in categories of "Global North" and "Global South". But what about all those cities that escape easy classification into these hemispheric categories? Cities that could be said to belong to the Global Easts. This introduction to the special issue "The Global Easts in Global Urbanism: views from beyond North and South" shines a spotlight on cities in-between North and South. At the risk of being sidelined in debates in global urbanism, these cities have much to contribute to global theorizations of the urban. This introduction presents a group of articles that in different ways illustrate the breadth and depth of current research on urban and geographical knowledge production in and with the Global Easts. We specifically focus on one emergent convergence among urban research concerns, namely, problematizing the unidirectional teleology of a transition to an ideal type free market economy with democracy which is often at work with regard to cities in the Global Easts. The collected papers draw our attention to a number of co-existing temporalities and differing time coordinates and claim that it is high time for the Global Easts to contest their marginalization in the global academe. © 2020 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

This special issue originates from a transnational collaboration of scholars in philology, comparative literature, social theory, sociology, anthropology, ethnography, and media studies. The collection strives to advance a research agenda built on the nexus of three intellectual and academic domains: post-Soviet 'Russian cultural studies', the research paradigm put forward by Cultural Studies, as well as empirical methods developed in sociology. The collection illustrates the importance of expanding the experience of Cultural Studies beyond its established spheres of national investigation, while it also speaks to the necessity to re-evaluate the hegemony of the English-language academic and cultural production on the global scale. The collection offers insights into the gamut of cultural practices and institutional environments in which Russian cultural production happens today. It shows how cultural industries and institutions in Russia are integrated into the global marketplace and transnational communities, while they also draw on and contribute to local lives and experiences by trying to create an autonomous space for symbolic production at personal and collective levels. Through diverse topics, the issue sheds light on the agency, i.e. practitioners and participants, creators and consumers, of Russian cultural production and the neoliberal practices implemented on creative work and cultural administration in Russia today. The Introduction outlines the development of academic studies on Russian cultural practices since 1991; describes main political developments shaping the cultural field in Putin's Russia; and, finally, identifies the Cultural Studies debates the editors of the collection find most productive for investigations of Russia, i.e. the instrumentalization of culture and culture as resource. Relocated in an analysis of a post-socialist society, these conceptualisations seem increasingly problematic in a situation where local and federal policies governing cultural and creative work focus simultaneously on marketization and on nationalism as the main tools of legitimizing the federal government. © 2018, © 2018 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.