TaRC and the Russian Media Lab’s (University of Helsinki) collaborative initiative, Online Talks on Russian Media, continues on Tuesday 14 February with another exciting presentation.
Varvara Preter from the Ben Gurion University of the Negev will present her on-going research on recent immigrants from Russia in Israel.
In October 2022, the Russian-language Israeli public sphere was blown up by the “pumpkin latte” scandal.
A recent immigrant from Russia posted in one of the biggest Russian-language Israeli Facebook groups a question about where she can find a pumpkin latte in Israel. The innocent question opened the avenue for a wide and wild discussion in social media on a new wave of immigration.
This case was not the first scandal in the Russian-language Israeli public sphere where different immigrant groups from the former USSR clash. As previous research shows, the basis for the tension between Russian-language immigrants lies in the positioning of these groups both in relation to the home country and within the host country.
After Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the number of immigrants from Russia has increased, which has exacerbated this tension further.
In this research, Preter uses digital ethnography to study the new immigrants from Russia in Israel. Using a corpus of texts from social media, she explores controversies of immigrant belongings, identities, political views, and civil positions in home and host countries and in a transnational perspective.
Based on Bourdieu’s class theory and Rene Girard’s concept of scapegoating, she investigates how different groups of Russian-language immigrants in Israel clash in this case and what their social group positioning is in this clash.
Speaker bio:
Varvara Preter is a PhD student at the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (Israel). The title of her upcoming PhD thesis is From Putin to Israel: Ethnography of New Immigrants from Russia in Israel in 2010-2020s.
Before her PhD research project, Preter has been studying Russian-language media where her expertise lies at the intersection of media ecology and user practices studies. She is the author of the monograph In the Center of a Cyclone: Marshall McLuhan’s Instruments of Media Environment Analysis (2023, in press) [in Russian].
Varvara Preter’s Online Talk will be held on Zoom on Tuesday 14 February, 12:00-13:30 (Helsinki time, GMT+2). The discussion will be moderated by Olga Dovbysh (University of Helsinki).
If you want to participate and get emails about the next Online Talks, please leave your contact information here by noon (Helsinki time) on Monday 13 February. If you have registered for Online Talks or the RMLN email list before, no need to register again! You will get the information.