Alexei Yurchak (University of California, Berkeley, USA)

Cultural anthropologist (PhD, Duke University, 1997). Associate Professor in the UC Berkeley Department of Anthropology as well as a Core Faculty member in the graduate program at the Department of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies at UC Berkeley. Author of “Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation” (winner of 2007 Wayne Vucinic Book Award for best book of the year from American Society for Eastern European, Eurasian and Slavic Studies; winner of 2015 Prosvetitel Book Prize for best nonfiction book of the year in the humanities from Dynasty Foundation). Yurchak's theoretical interests include the analysis of human agency and its interplay with language and discourses of power especially in post-Soviet Russia and Eastern Europe. He is particularly interested in the analysis of how ideologies (political, cultural, national, market, etc.) are projected on and work through language, and what methods of discourse analysis social scientists can use to unpack their discursive power. He is concerned with the cultural shifts brought forth by the collapse of the Soviet ideology, state institutions, and centralized economic principles and the formation of socialist and post-socialist identities and subject positions.