Citizenship, Deviance, and Identity

RésuméCitoyenneté, déviance et identité : la presse soviétique pour la jeunesse, agent du contrôle social à l’époque du DégelEn 1954-1955, poussé par la politique de Xruščev qui visait à donner corps à l’utopie communiste et par la hausse perceptible de la délinquance juvénile, le parti communiste lança la campagne pour les loisirs afin de réguler le temps libre des jeunes. L’article étudie certains des aspects coercitifs de cette initiative et examine le rôle joué par les publications pour la jeunesse qui imposèrent des contrôles sociaux aux jeunes « déviants » tels les hooligans ou les zazous (stiljagi). En se fondant sur la presse, les archives et la littérature, l’auteur apporte un nouvel éclairage au tournant pris par la politique de Hruščev qui visait à diriger la jeunesse par le biais du pouvoir infrastructurel et de la violence symbolique combinés à la mobilisation de la société et au soutien des initiatives de la jeunesse. Les sources montrent que la rhétorique journalistique, lestée d’ambiguïtés, a laissé de la place à la négociation, peut-être délibérément. L’auteur suggère que ces ambiguïtés ont ébranlé la cohésion du discours public sur la campagne pour les loisirs et ont contribué au développement de l’autonomie de la jeunesse.AbstractIn 1954 and 1955, impelled by Khrushchev’s drive to reach communist utopia and a perceived rise in juvenile delinquency, the Communist Party launched the Leisure Campaign to regulate young people’s free time. This article investigates some of the coercive aspects of the leisure initiative by examining the role played by youth newspapers in imposing social controls over young “deviants” such as hooligans and style-seekers (stiliagi). Utilizing press, archival, and literary sources, our research sheds light on the Khrushchev leadership’s turn toward managing the young via infrastructural power and symbolic violence, combined with societal mobilization and encouragement of youth initiative. Evidence shows that the press rhetoric proved riddled with ambiguities and left room for negotiation, perhaps deliberately. These ambiguities, I suggest, undermined the cohesion of public discourse on the leisure campaign and contributed to the development of youth autonomy

Domestic Cultural Diplomacy and Soviet State-Sponsored Popular Culture in the Cold War

The Ohio State University Mershon Center for International Security StudiesGleb Tsipursky is assistant professor of history at The Ohio State University. His research is in the field of modern Russian and Eurasian history, with a particular interest in socialist modernity, youth, consumption, popular culture, emotions, the Cold War, crime, violence, and social controls.Mershon Center for International Security StudiesEvent Web Page, Streaming Video, Event Photo

PLEASURE, POWER, AND THE PURSUIT OF COMMUNISM: SOVIET YOUTH AND STATE-SPONSORED POPULAR CULTURE DURING THE EARLY COLD WAR, 1945-1968

My dissertation investigates how the Soviet Party-state tried to build communism through fun and leisure during the early Cold War. I explore organized cultural activities for young people, including concerts, shows, dances, and cultural education-what I collectively call state-sponsored popular culture. My research relies on archives, newspapers and other official publications, literature, cinema, memoirs, and interviews. Chapter 1 overviews state-sponsored popular culture from its early years to the immediate postwar period. The next chapter illuminates the extreme politicization in the officially recommended cultural activities during the anticosmopolitan campaign, 1947 to 1953. Chapter 3 traces the attack on western-style music and dancing in state-sponsored popular culture in the same period, and the difficulties in fully implementing this policy. In chapter 4, I explore how the more pluralistic cultural policies during the early Thaw, 1953-56, impacted organized cultural activities. The fifth chapter presents a case study of the transformations in the Thaw by focusing on the novel institution of youth initiative clubs. Chapter 6 provides insights on the Kremlin's campaign to instill normative aesthetic tastes among youth as part of a brief militant turn in late 1956 and 1957. Finally, the last chapter traces the zig-zags in top-level cultural policy and its impact on youth everyday life during the socialist sixties, 1958 to 1968. I conclude that a multitude of young people truly had fun in Soviet organized cultural activities. State-sponsored popular culture, riven by tensions between a hard-line and soft-line approach to cultural policy, opened up significant room for youth agency and grassroots activism. This proved especially true during the Thaw, with the new post-Stalin leadership seeking to build a socialist alternative to a western modern consumer society as a means of constructing communism and fighting the Cold War on the domestic front. For state-sponsored popular culture, this socialist consumer society meant a combination of satisfying cultural consumption desires, shaping aesthetic tastes, and eliciting initiative from below.Doctor of Philosoph

Minimizing the Dangers of Air Pollution Using Alternative Facts: A Science Museum Case Study

A science museum exhibition about human health contains an exhibit that minimizes health impacts of air pollution. Relevant details, such as the full range of health risks; fossil fuel combustion; air quality statutes (and the local electrical utility’s violations of these statues), are omitted, while end users of electricity are blamed. The exhibit accomplishes this, not through outright falsification, but through selected “alternative facts” that change the focus and imply misleading alternate explanations. Using two classical rhetorical concepts (the practical syllogism and the enthymeme) allows for the surfacing of missing evidence and unstated directives underlying multimodal rhetoric. By stating multimedia arguments syllogistically, a technique is proposed for revealing hidden political sub-texts from beneath a putatively disinterested presentation of facts. The piece should be of interest to researchers, message designers and policy makers interested in the rhetoric of science, ecology, health and museums

A Psychological Approach to Promoting Truth in Politics: The Pro-Truth Pledge

Some recent psychology research has shown why people engage in deceptive behavior, and how we can prevent them from doing so. Given the alarming amount of fake news in the US public sphere, a group of psychologists has sought to combine the available research in a proposed intervention, the Pro-Truth Pledge, to help address this problem. The pledge asks signees to commit to 12 behaviors that research in psychology shows correlate with an orientation toward truthfulness. Early results show both that private citizens and public figures are willing to take the pledge, and initial survey, interview, and observational evidence shows the effectiveness of the pledge on reducing sharing misinformation on social media