Through popular culture, societies project their collective fears and desires, inner conflicts, and contradictions. It redefines national and social symbols and narratives while being both global and local at the same time. Popular culture in Eastern and East-Central Europe has fulfilled various functions since the 1980s, bringing forth models of nation, society, family, home, and other collective belongings. In its double role, it contributed to dissident and subcultural movements while also facilitating the normalization of conservative and nationalistic discourses. The joint project “ADJUSTMENT AND RADICALISATION: DYNAMICS IN POPULAR CULTURE(S) IN PRE-WAR EASTERN EUROPE” traces the contradictory dynamics of popular culture in the region from a comparative and interdisciplinary perspective.

Six subprojects examine various cultural phenomena in Belarus, Poland, Russia, Ukraine, and Hungary, focusing on such diverse problems as: convergences between popular culture and populism, complex traditions of folk music and humor, the role of social media and new digital formats, the persistent influence of the Second World War on contemporary imagination, contested spaces in recent TV series, links between anti-gender politics and Holocaust popular novels, and many more.

Popular Dynamics is a platform that connects scholars and practitioners of popular culture of Eastern and East-Central Europe. It maps publications, events, and other projects dedicated to the dynamics of popular culture in the region in recent decades and offers new insights into current research on the topic.

Since the 1980s, popular culture has fulfilled a number of specific functions in Eastern and East-Central Europe: it served to mediate Western trends, images, and stories while also redefining national, religious, or state-socialist symbolisms and narratives. Regarding models of society, family, home, and other identities, popular culture has the potential to link notions of modernity, zeitgeist, and material wealth with both progressive and conservative values. It may contribute to a subcultural, oppositional, or dissident radicalisation, but also to a rather uncritical consumerism and normalisation of nationalist discourses. Thus, popular culture emerges as a vehicle for both collective wishes and dreams, latent frustrations and fears. From a cultural studies perspective, it is particularly interesting to examine the aesthetic and medial resources used in popular cultural products and practices and how they become politically effective, thus shaping the social debates within these cultures. To avoid a one-sided observation of popular culture as a form of counterculture and “resistance” against cultural hierarchies and structures of power, we must consider its problematic potentials. These may not only be found in popular culture’s commercialisation, but also in populist radicalisation and a discursive adaptation to political power relations. As both an indicator and a booster of societal moods, popular culture plays a key role in understanding socio-political developments.

This joint project explores the developmental dynamics of popular cultures in Belarus, Poland, Russia, Ukraine, and Hungary since the 1980s from an interdisciplinary and a comparative perspective. Headed by the ZfL and in cooperation with the Leibniz Institute for the History and Culture of Eastern Europe (GWZO), the Leibniz Centre for Contemporary History (ZFF), and the Professorship for Slavic Literature and Cultural Studies (with a focus on Polish Studies) at the University of Potsdam, the project will conduct a series of case studies to research popular culture phenomena and genres. The subprojects take on a literary, historical, or culture and media studies perspective to address popular-cultural phenomena and figures in different genres: from literature, film, and the fine arts to TV shows, folk and popular music, videos, memes, murals, and graffiti to political journalism and social media. The comparative, interdisciplinary examination of popular-cultural products and trends promises new insights into their dynamics—from the euphoric awakening of democratisation in the 1980s and 1990s to the current rise of nationalist ideologies and right- wing populist or authoritarian political structures. Furthermore, the project’s layout allows us to map out the similarities and differences between the analysed late and post-socialist national popular cultures and their development.

Beyond the work in the individual subprojects, the joint project will build an international research network to obtain a better universal understanding of general dynamics and operating principles of popular culture in the light of digitalisation, globalisation, and their respective conditions.