For the next YES Seminar, Evgeny Manzhurin from the University of Eastern Finland will talk about late Soviet discursive landscape.

In my lecture, I critique the go-to view of the Soviet discursive landscape as controlled by a dominant discourse in which cultural and social alternatives operated like scintillating pockets of insideoutness, akin to semi-submerged tidal islands in the sea (Yurchak, 2006). Using the empirical example of the Soviet Heraldic Revival (1959–1987), I demonstrate how a peripheral discourse could be established as legitimate, eventually become normative, spread through official media across the Soviet Union, and engender novel practices reaching tens of millions of citizens and consumers. I discern both the structural conditions and the embodied agency which made it possible and argue that more such discourses remain to be discovered. I then offer theoretical tools that could facilitate such discoveries.

Evgeny Manzhurin is a researcher and ABD at the University of Eastern Finland. His dissertation, The City with A Shield, explores peripheral agency and social imagination in the Late Soviet Union. Evgeny published at Oxford and Columbia university presses and was a visiting researcher at Lviv Centre for Urban History and Institute of Advanced Studies, UCL.