Hosting International Events at a Time of Global Crisis: Place-Making and Recentralization May 16, 2010

The global crisis amplified the tendency that was commented upon long before it happened, namely, that the global processes, regardless of how greatly they are facilitated by the Internet, are difficult to imagine without them being periodically localized in particular places and becoming mega-events. It is not only that global and local scales intersect during these events but variety of other scales do so as well (the most important being regional and national). For instance, nations and the regions, as well as cities, aim to “brand’ themselves as the competition for visibility and related benefit increases. It is the run-up to the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and BRIC trans-national summits that were held in Ekaterinburg in June 2009, the ways they were presented to the public, and the public response to the authorities’ attempts to justify the considerable expenditure that I focus on in order to show the ways in which the official discourse(s) and the public anxieties overlap in a process of place-making in Russia’s forth largest city.

Elena Trubina is professor of philosophy at Ural State University, Ekaterinburg, Russia. Except her home university, she lectures widely throughout Russia and abroad, namely, in Italy, Kyrgyzstan, Finland, Germany and the US. Her research deals broadly with social theory, urban and cultural studies, and the interactions between urban space, politics, memory, and subjectivity. She has been a recipient of numerous fellowships, including the ones awarded by Fulbright Foundation, DAAD, Carnegie Foundation, IFK (Vienna). She is co-organizer of the interdisciplinary international project “Diverse Cultures in the Contemporary World”, sponsored by the Kennan Institute which resulted in a book “Dilemmas of Diversity after the Cold War: Analyses of Cultural Differences by United States– and Russia-Based Scholars” (2010, in print), co-edited with Michele Rivkin-Fish, and of the Russian-Finnish project on the Russian media, the ideas of the good life, and post-Soviet subjectivities. Together with Arja Rosenholm and Kaarle Nordenstreng, she co-edited the volume “Russian Mass Media and Changing Values” with the Finnish colleagues (Routledge, 2010, in print). Her publications in Russian include two books devoted to post-Soviet identities, a few textbooks, a book on urban theory “Urbanisticheskaya Teoriya” (2008), and “Trauma: punkty” (Moscow, 2009) – an edited collection of essays on various social and cultural dimensions of trauma written by American, European, and Russian scholars and co-edited with Sergey Oushakine. She is currently working on a project devoted to mobility and cosmopolitanism.

Conference information provided by konferenciakalauz.hu

Official Website: http://www.ceu.hu/events/2010-05-17/hosting-international-events-at-a-time-of-global-crisis-place-making-and-recentral