Please join us in celebrating the release of Youth Politics in Putin's Russia: Producing Patriots and Entrepreneurs, a new book by UMass Associate Professor of Anthropology and Center for Research on Families Scholar Dr. Julie Hemment.

Dr. Julie Hemment, associate professor of anthropology and former CRF scholar, will discuss her book, followed by a moderated discussion and reception.

Julie Hemment, Ph.D. provides a fresh perspective on the controversial nationalist youth projects that have proliferated in Russia in the Putin era, examining them from the point of view of their participants and offering provocative insights into their origins and significance. The pro-Kremlin organization Nashi (“Ours”) and other state-run initiatives to mobilize Russian youth have been widely reviled in the West, seen as Soviet throwbacks and evidence of Russia’s authoritarian turn. By contrast, Hemment’s detailed ethnographic analysis - based on a collaborative research project with Russian feminist scholars and their students - finds an astute global awareness and a paradoxical kinship with the international democracy-promoting interventions of the 1990s. Drawing on Soviet political forms but responding to 21st-century disenchantments with the neoliberal state, these projects seek to produce not only patriots, but also volunteers, entrepreneurs, and activists.

In this presentation, Hemment will speak about the goals and motivations of this collaborative research and the form of engaged scholarship it represented - an East-West feminist exchange that sought to intervene in a worsening geopolitical climate.