Person

Lecturer, Doctoral Student

Central and Eastern European Studies
Centre for Languages and Literature

Contact information

E-mail alena.mincheniaslav.luse

Visiting address
Helgonabacken 12, Lund

Postal address
Box 201, 221 00 Lund

Internal post code 20

Room SOL:A416

I am a gender scholar and a social scientist. I hold my Master of Philosophy degree in Gender Studies from the Central European University (Budapest, Hungary) and MA degree in Cultural Studies from the European Humanities University (Minsk, Belarus).

My academic interests include studies of nonviolence and civilresistance, cultural politics of emotion, research on Eastern Europe, feministtheory, and (auto)ethnography. Mydoctoral research looks at emotionality of political protests in Belarus - acountry often called ‘the last dictatorship in Europe'. These protests areusually seen and rhetorically framed as ‘a fight for democracy’. My projectaims at critical rethinking of both local and western narratives about resistancein the postsocialist region and in Belarus, in particular. I would like toanalyze how emotions shape and feature in activists’ narratives about'changes', 'democracy', 'Europe and its value', and 'Belarus as the lastdictatorship' and how subjectivities are performed in experiences of dissent.

Research

My profile in Lund University research portal

Emotionality of Dissent and Continuity of the (Un)Changed in Belarus: Ethnography of Political Protests in Minsk, 2015-2017

The primary goal of my research project is to explore circulation and manifestations of emotionality of political protests in contemporary Belarus and interrelations of these protests with political uprisings in Central and Eastern Europe and Middle East and Northern Africa.

The research analyses how and by what means emotional intensities of political protests are sustained. I am interested in how gender, class and geopolitical asymmetries are (re)produced by discourses about political changes and how and what subject positions in respect to gender, class, location and age are constructed by experiences and discourses of dissent. I take as a case for my research numerous attempts of political mobilization in Eastern Europe and in Belarus, in particular.

Theoretically, I draw on two corresponding shifts:
- the general reconceptualization of emotions as social and reflective of a power structure rather than the inner self (e.g., Ahmed 2004, Lutz 1988, Svasek 2005);
- the claim of centrality of emotions for analysis of protest and politics (e.g. Jasper 1998,Flam 2004, Svasek 2005).