The second Online Talk on Eurasian Media of 2025 focuses on the intersections of Indigeneity, gender, and LGBT rights in Russophone activist social media.
Our speaker, PhD Eeva Kuikka (Tampere University), has conducted this topical study as part of the Academy of Finland-funded project FEMCORUS: Mediated Feminism(s) in Contemporary Russia.
The starting point of Dr Kuikka’s study is the many initiatives in Russia that have emerged as anti-war campaigns, resisting Russia’s military invasion in Ukraine and the unproportionate recruitment of men from Indigenous people and other ethnic minorities to the front.
While these projects and movements have adopted the language of decolonization to bring forth Russia’s colonial history and the present-day politics maintaining discriminative and racist social structures, they also regularly voice out issues that are related to women’s and LGBT rights.
Kuikka’s presentation addresses the role of gender and LGBT questions as part of decolonial projects’ attempts at dismantling colonial structures and pointing to intersecting forms of colonial and heteropatriarchal oppression.
The presentation asks if digital social media platforms – where the activist content is mostly shared – play any role in the intersecting of decolonial and feminist content.
Speaker bio:
PhD Eeva Kuikka is a postdoctoral researcher in the project FEMCORUS: Mediated Feminism(s) in Contemporary Russia at Tampere University. Kuikka’s doctoral dissertation that she defended in May 2024 addressed human-animal relations in Indigenous literatures of the Soviet North.
In the postdoctoral phase, her research focuses on Indigenous cultures and activism in the post-Soviet context.
Event info:
This Online Talk is part of the collaborative initiative between TaRC and the Russian Media Lab Network (University of Helsinki). It will be held on Zoom on Tuesday 11 February, 12.00–13.30 Finnish time (GMT+2). The discussion will be moderated by Dr Olga Dovbysh (University of Helsinki).
Participation in the event requires registration. Please register through this link no later than Sunday 9 February at 23.59 Finnish time (GMT+2).