How can we study visual materials from social media? We will use examples from several case studies related to Russia in order to consider the use of social media posts as a source for anthropologists and sociologists but will concentrate on Immortal Regiment as it is represented on Instagram to see some intersections of the state propaganda and grass-roots level social trends.
About the Speaker:
Ilya Utekhin is an anthropologist working in anthropology of technology, medical anthropology, and in the study of talk-in-interaction. From 1996 to 2022, he taught in the Department of Anthropology, European University at St.Petersburg. He is co-curator of the Virtual Museum of Soviet Everyday Life: Communal Living in Russia, which contains ethnographic materials on on Soviet and post-Soviet urban housing, also reflected in his monograph Essays on the Communal Everyday Life (Moscow 2001, 2004, in Russian). In 2017-20, Ilya was founder and CEO of a news aggregator service that showed two alternative agendas: official Russian media vs independent media. Ilya is the author of a number of documentary films. In Fall 2022, as a Visiting Scholar at Boston University, he worked with the materials of the Maya Deren Collection in Howard Gotlieb Archival Center. His recent book, Visual Anthropology: A Guide to Ethnographic Film (In Russian), is about the history of ethnographic filmmaking. He is a Visiting Scholar at the Robert F. Byrnes Russian and East European Institute during 2023.
