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The contemporary turn toward illiberal politics across numerous countries reveals a set of recurring tendencies: rising xenophobia and social polarization targeting minorities; the revival of nineteenth-century principles of foreign policy based on spheres of influence and the privileges of great powers; the discrediting of expert knowledge; the fragmentation of public discourse into mutually isolated ideological clusters; the framing of painful social issues as elements of conspiracy and culture wars; and an increasing tolerance for violence between states and social groups.
This course treats the contemporary “crisis of truth” as an entry point into a broader problem: the crisis of communication, social polarization, and the erosion of the social contract in contemporary societies. Illiberal regimes and movements do not simply reject truth; rather, they seek to monopolize, instrumentalize, or strategically destabilize the very ideas of common truth and common good. The resulting crisis affects not only political institutions, but also the
everyday forms through which individuals and groups recognize, address, and imagine one another. The final aim of the course is therefore not simply to “restore” damaged communicative pacts, but to imagine new scenarios of interpersonal imagination: new ways in which individuals and groups can perceive, address, recognize, and respond to one another without reducing social, cultural, and psychological complexity.
Presented by The New University in Exile Consortium at The New School for Social Research.
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IDr. Ilya Kukulin is a poet, literary critic, cultural historian, and cultural sociologist, and a visiting research fellow at the Amherst Center for Russian Culture. He is the author of Machines of Noisy Time: How Soviet Montage Became an Aesthetic Method of the Unofficial Culture and co-author of A Guerilla Logos: The Project of Dmitry Aleksandrovich Prigov, and has published several collections of poetry, with his work translated into English, Italian, Albanian, Serbian, and Georgian.
Dr. Maria Mayofis has been an Associate Professor and Senior Research Fellow at the School of Advanced Research in the Humanities at the Russian Academy of National Economy and Public Administration since 2011. She previously served as an editor of the leading Russian literary studies journal New Literary Observer and is the author of Appeal to Europe: The Literary Society “Arzamas” and the Russian Modernization Project of 1815–1818, as well as co-editor of volumes on Soviet children’s and youth culture and education.
The New University in Exile Consortium regularly offers a series of free, 10-week, co-led online seminars. The seminars are taught by two endangered scholars – one who is hosted by a Consortium member institution, and the other a colleague of their choice. The seminars are designed to reconnect endangered scholars with the academic community they have lost while in exile and reengage students from around the world with professors they have lost. They are free and open to anyone anywhere in the world with an internet connection.
To learn more and register visit our Fall 2026 Hub, Linked Here!
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