What does the theme “Conflict & Cooperation” mean to you? 

Unlike war and peace, I believe that cooperation does not rule out conflict, and vice versa. Indeed, cooperation often involves conflict. There is hardly any sustained cooperation that does not also demand that collaborators deal with each other’s conflictual viewpoints.

How does this theme play a role in your work?

Cooperation and conflict is a fundamental theme of sociological thought. ‘Under which conditions do people cooperate?’ is a classical sociological question, for instance guiding Émile Durkheim’s writings on social solidarity. For my own work, the related question ‘How does a sense of groupness develop?’ has been fundamental. In my book “Flexible Authoritarianism”, I examine how young ambitious Russians apprehend the patriotic ideals of a technically modern, yet culturally neotraditional Russia at state-run events and weaving these ideals together in different quests for social change. As I show, many co-create a government-sponsored form of civic life, for instance through digital activism that echoes patriotic ideals.

What project(s) will you be working on during your fellowship at the Forum Basiliense?

The focus during my fellowship is on creating a systematic methodology for the multimodal analysis of music videos. By multimodal I mean the analysis of the interplay of sound, moving images and lyrics. Especially when the digital content’s political effect is under scrutiny, a focus on lyrics has prevailed in past scholarship. This may be too limiting because it does not do justice to social media users’ multi-sensory experience. My project is animated by the question of how such content reinforces group boundaries and may even legitimate war. At the same time, however, musical experience may create the very conditions for the emergence of a sense of groupness that instead animates cooperation.