Logistical Infrastructures of Attention for Russian Anti-War Protests

The next speaker in this ECREA PolCom 2023 conference session is Svetlana Chuikina, whose interest is in how Russian anti-war activists (including in the diaspora around the world) engage in the construction of media events in order to promote their messages. There are a number of such groups, including the Feminist Anti-War Resistance (FAR), the Youth Democratic Movement (VESNA), and Technologies for Social Good (Teplica).

Svetlana is taking a long-term perspective on these movements, and on how their positioning has changed over the past ten years or so. She also interviewed Russian participants in anti-war demonstrations in Stockholm, in order to understand how they became involved in these efforts. This extends the focus beyond individual events to the analytical category of inbetweenness: the intersection of broader publics, activists, and technologies.

This also requires a focus on the logistical infrastructures of attention: not least, the affordances of digital and social media platforms that enable small acts of engagement like likes, shares, and comments. This also introduces a logistical bias, however, as the movement of various types of representation becomes more significant than the representation per se.

This shift from media events to logistical infrastructures of attention is exemplified for instance by protest events that stage symbolic representations of the events of the Russian war against Ukraine in the public squares of Russian cities; this contributes to the creation of an event as a space of appearance.