contributors

Articles by Ekaterina Tarasova & Karin Edberg

1. TIKTOK and TELEGRAM as platforms for political mobilization in Belarus and Russia

   Over the past decade, social networking platforms have become an important communication channel for protesters in autocratic countries. In August 2020 and January 2021, the messaging application Telegram and social media platform Tik-Tok became platforms for protest mobilization and coordination in Belarus and Russia respectively. This article applies previous research within social movements and democratization studies about the use of Facebook and Twitter to instigate and galvanize protests in autocratic countries in order to explore how protest mobilization on newly politicized platforms such as Telegram and TikTok is manifested. For this purpose, we conducted a qualitative content analysis of 1,128 protest-related publications (posts) on Telegram’s channel NextaLive and 100 videos on TikTok. The conclusion provides an extended framework for analyzing political mobilization online and argues that social networking platforms can themselves be considered spaces that are commensurate with those of offline protest and not merely tools to stimulate democratic participation.

2. “ THE SWEDISH STATE IS BREAKING UP WITH CIVIL SOCIETY”

   International Conference “Exploring the relation between antigender politics and democracy: the Baltic Sea region and beyond” held at Södertörn University on September 26–27, 2024. The conference brought together scholars, activists, and politicians to address the challenges of antigender politics in the Baltic sea region. Funded by the Foundation for Baltic and East European Studies, it was a part of a Horizon Europe project: Co-Creating Inclusive Intersectional Democratic Spaces Across Europe CCINDLE.

3. RUSSIA AND GERMANY IN TUG-OF-WAR OVER IMMANUEL KANT

   This year, 300 years have elapsed since the great German philosopher Immanuel Kant was born in 1724 in Königsberg, in what was then East Prussia.

4. Challenging the nationalist hegemony The third generation displaced persons and new approaches to the difficult past

   Review article of Kassandra Larysa Luciuk, Making Ukrainian Canadians: Identity, Politics, and Power in Cold War Canada, (Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Toronto, 2021) xv+338 pages.

5. The depiction of hippies in Soviet Latvia IN MIERVALDIS BIRZE’S Rozā  ZILONIS [THE PINK ELEPHANT]

   The article discusses the portrayal of hippies in The Pink Elephant (Rozā zilonis, 1976), a story by the Latvian SSR writer and physician, Miervaldis Birze (1921–2000). The author’s attitude towards this counterculture is mostly critical, even patronizing; however, it is through the portrayal of the hippies, Broņislavs and Baiba, that the author indulges in a conversation about young adulthood, revives the story, and even trifles with the questionable or inadmissible aspects of life. The Pink Elephant, when read through the lens of renewed interest about Soviet hippies, reveals their living conditions, attitude towards power, their parents, and themselves. As opposed to their Western counterparts, the impoverished Soviet hippies (who had experienced the system of blats and the shadow economy) did not condemn consumerism; in fact, they sought out material goods, especially those originating from the other side of the ocean.

6. Nostalgia or nightmare? Recollections of urban childhood in Eastern Germany

   If the grand narrative of German reunification in the autumn of 1989 in media discourse used to be a more or less coherent story of successful reconciliation, recent political developments have made it necessary to question some of the nuances of this seemingly flawless narrative. One way of doing this is to present personal memories in narrative form for consideration as more or less autobiographical accounts from the inside, so to speak. A growing number of writers who were children and young people 35 years ago, at the time of reunification, are now starting to write about their childhood and memories of the reunification process. These stories display more or less biographical features, albeit composite and contrived. In this paper, two novels, both dealing with the past, are compared: Grit Lemke’s affirmative oral history Kinder von Hoy (2021) and David Blum’s more critical Dantesque underworld narrative Kollektorgang (2023). Lemke’s depiction of a happy childhood is rather nostalgic, if not downright ostalgic (“East-nostalgic”), while Blum’s is much more discerning. Generational considerations may explain this difference in approach. What they have in common is that they ascribe significance to the big city with its high-rise buildings as a symbol of a collapsed system, based on their own memories of reunification.

7. THE LURE OF MAPS. A SYMPOSIUM ON THE IMAGING OF SPATIAL REALITIES UNDER OCCUPATION AND WAR

   On April 22, 2024, professor Steven Seegel, University of Texas at Austin, was awarded the Vega medal from the hands of the King of Sweden in the Royal Palace in Stockholm, “for his scientific contributions to Human Geography.”

8. Roundtable. Academic journals Noticing the editors

   At this year’s CBEES Annual Conference (November 28–29, 2024, at S.dertörn University), Ninna Mörner (Baltic Worlds) and Joakim Ekman (CBEES) organized a roundtable discussion on academic journals with a focus on the Baltic Sea region and Eastern Europe.

9. CBEES Annual Conference: “Shaping Futures: The Baltics and Eastern Europe in the World” November 28-29, 2024

   The 10th CBEES Annual Conference offers a time of retrospection and a time of new imaginings – a time to […]

10. Catching the Specter: Stepan Bandera between Myth, Meme, Death, and Memory in War-Turn Ukraine

    In this essay, the author is engaging with the transforming presence of Stepan Bandera (1909-1959) in the Ukrainian social media space between 2014 and 2024. Building along and against the mainstream discussions on collective memory, The author argues that with the presence of war, the Ukrainian social media users memefied Bandera, making him a useful tool for politically-driven activities and an emptied signifier to be used in ironic contexts. The author also shows that in war-torn Ukraine, the meme and the myth of Bandera are intertwined with the commemorations of those who died on the frontline, which requires a nuanced understanding of the country’s changing memory landscape.

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