Anastasiya Astapova
Dados Biográficos
| ID | 134374 |
|---|---|
| NOME | Anastasiya Astapova |
| PRENOMES | Anastasiya |
| SOBRENOME | Astapova |
| ASSINATURA | ASTAPOVA A |
| AFILIAÇÕES | University of Tartu |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-9401-0909 |
| VERIFICADO | Sim |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 25 |
| TOTAL DE CITAÇÕES | 44 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 23 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 1 |
| PRIMEIRO ANO DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2013 |
| ANO MAIS RECENTE DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 3 |
Navigating Post-truth
Combatting conspiracy theories (also via humour)
This article focuses on popular understandings of how to combat conspiracy theories. Our case study is an Estonian-language Facebook group, “Victory of Light! Continuation”, which was founded in the middle of the pandemic. This group exemplifies a case of social media activism, bringing together people dedicated to fighting disinformation by reporting on and trolling those who spread it. Based on online fieldwork and an interview with the group’s…
Why We Tell Stories
Ethnic segregation of consumption in Estonia
The segregation of consumption between the Russian- and Estonian-speaking populations residing in Estonia has been common knowledge in the popular imagination, mass media publications, and academic papers. Rather than undertaking an impossible mission to identify whether these narratives are true, in this article, I show how this repertoire of stories has fostered special marketing strategies and document the emergence of a special marketing nich…
Injecting fun? Humour, conspiracy theory and (anti)vaccination discourse in popular media
Conspiracy theories have accompanied vaccination since its mass introduction, circulating, among other forms, in humour – such as cartoons, and now, memes. Importantly, humour has targeted both vaccination and anti-vaccination stances. In this study, we discuss the peculiarities of humorous content within the vaccination debate and uncover the most popular thematic categories, forms and logical mechanisms of humour. We show that humorous and seri…
Conspiratorial Thinking among Russian Speakers in Estonia
This research stems from ethnographic interviews about COVID-19 conspiracy theories that uncovered that the interviewees (members of the Russophone minority residing in Estonia) perceived a significant connection between the pandemic and the war in Ukraine. I analyze major themes that bring two conspiracy theories together, one theory about the pandemic and the other about the war in Ukraine-and other narratives that tend to gravitate toward them…
Forum
It has been a year since the Russian invasion of Ukraine started. It is clear that the impact of this war goes far beyond Ukraine. We already know that it will have long-lasting consequences for the regional and global economy, in particular for energy and food security. The war is reshuffling old geo-political arrangements and alliances. It is also shaping the political landscapes of European states: international relations, inflation and migrat…
Authoritarian Cooptation of Civil Society
In Belarus, a vibrant civil society coexisted for the better part of the past decade with a firmly entrenched autocracy in a depoliticised cooptation mode. Through cooptation, the energy of civil society was channelled from representing a threat to the regime into being its resource. However, the capacity developed by civil society during this period of political inactivity was quickly redeployed for political purposes at the junction of economic…
An Estonian-Russian Language Club as a Venue for Grassroots Ethnic Integration
One third of Estonian residents identify Russian as their mother tongue, and despite having lived in Estonia for decades, many of them are not fluent in the Estonian language and choose to remain stateless rather than obtain Estonian citizenship by passing the state language exam. Ethnic segregation in Estonia continues to be a matter of bitter political debate, not least in the context of tensions with neighboring Russia and pressure from the EU…
Vaccine Hesitancy Counter Memes
This essay is part of a forum that includes Tom Mould's article "Counter Memes and Anti-Legends in Online Welfare Discourse" (2022) and response essays published in this issue ("Memes and Representations of Race: An Analysis of Historical Representations of Welfare" by Mia Moody-Ramirez and "In a Land of Venn Diagrams: Reflections on Anti-Fans and Counter Memes, Trolls and Anti-Legends" by Whitney Phillips)
Humor and Rumor in the Post-Soviet Authoritarian State
Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Belarus, an example of an authoritarian state, Humor and Rumor in the Post-Soviet Authoritarian State presents over one hundred contemporary political jokes in the contexts of their performance. Throughout, Anastasiya Astapova demonstrates the salience of the joke genre, the multiplicity of humor manifestations, and the fundamental presence of intertextual links between jokes and another folk genre—rumor. Info…
Waterlow, Jonathan
Conspiracy Theories in Eastern Europe
Ferroconcrete cases, sausage migrants, and Santa Barbara
In this article, I present the results of my fieldwork among refugees and asylum seekers in Estonia. I start with an explanation of the refugee situation in Estonia and its public perception which mainly concentrates on Asian and African refugees. Then, the article focuses on a large yet overlooked group of asylum seekers from post-Soviet countries, the reasons they have for coming to Estonia, and the main discussions among them on the asylum pro…
Soviet meta-jokes
This article provides the first published collection and analysis of Soviet meta-jokes, accompanied by a review of meta-joke research, and a discussion of the ways that scholars have understood the term. As far as possible, the Soviet meta-jokes published here appear in chronological order with the goal of showing how, with the help of certain intertextual links, these jokes reflected political and historical changes in joke-telling culture. Sovi…
Veyshnoria
As a humorous response to the threat of the Russian occupation of Belarus during the joint military exercise of September 2017, civic activists created the fictional Republic of Veyshnoria. This meme soon obtained all the attributes of a micro-nation, including numerous virtual citizens, serving to critique the autocratic government of Belarus and creating a platform for alternative nation-building. Via humor and fake news, fictional Veyshnoria i…
When the President Comes Potemkinist Order as an Alternative to Democracy in Belarus
The Potemkin village is a metaphor for the cases of conscious, yet false construction or beautification for the sake of presenting something as better than it is, usually in front of high officials. Enumerating multiple cases and possible applications of the term (and its synonyms), I base my research on Belarus, a former Soviet and still socialist independent state governed by the same president since 1994. Going there for fieldwork at least twi…
In Search for Truth
In this article, I analyze rumors about surveillance-unverified expressions of belief and narratives, which, despite their global omnipresence, are contextualized by local peculiarities and modalities. I concentrate on the narratives recorded in Belarus, notoriously referred to as "the last dictatorship of Europe." There, the rumors, largely inherited from the USSR, are reiterated due to the nontransparency of current legislation and other featur…
Rumor, Humor, and Other Forms of Election Folklore in Non-Democratic Societies
This article focuses on folk expressions on "the election without choice", as the state elections in authoritarian societies are often labeled.The research is based on the case of Belarus, where the electoral fraud has become a matter of common knowledge both for the Belarusians themselves and outside observers.Yet, even though the independent opinion polls are not exactly as positive for the Belarusian president as the official results of the el…
Political Biography
This research focuses on Belarus, a former Soviet republic that elected its first president, Alexander Lukashenko, in 1994. Lukashenko has ruled ever since, causing the country to become notorious as the last dictatorship in Europe. Having inherited a state system that was still socialist, Belarus enthusiastically preserved numerous Soviet elements of economics, politics, and everyday life. Within this context Lukashenko’s official biography port…
Counter-hegemony in today's Belarus
Tackling the role of state symbols in negotiating national identity and political development, this research focuses on Belarus where the alternative white-red-white flag became instrumental in protests against the dominant political discourse. Since 1995, oppositional mass media have been reporting about cases of this tricolor being erected in hard-to-reach and/or politically sensitive places. These actions were mainly attributed to some “Miron,…
Why All Dictators Have Moustaches
Based on the repertoire of Belarusian oral political jokes collected between 2011 and 2013, this article compares contemporary Belarusian humor to the earlier Socialist and contemporary non-Belarusian jokes. During this study, I discovered that Belarusian oral jokes mostly have versions created through various schemes of adaptation in other countries and about other figures (not necessarily political). The continuity goes far beyond the exchange …
De-abbreviations
The article is dedicated to the study of ludic de-abbreviation, backronymization, or, alternatively, humorous decoding of the well-known abbreviations (which usually serve as names for political parties, countries, universities, and so on). A brief survey of the existing research is provided. Then, despite the fact that de-abbreviation was considered characteristic of the Soviet period, now almost extinct, the author focuses on a case study based…
To what Extent are Jokes Reactional? (Based on a Joke Cycle about Yury Luzhkov's Dismissal)
The article concentrates on jokes that appeared immediately after the dismissal of Yury Luzhkov, Mayor of Moscow, in 2010. As soon as he was fired after eighteen years in the same position of mayor, the Internet was flooded with jokes about his dismissal as well as numerous discussions on internet forums and blogs. I collected the jokes as well as opinions from the discussions, categorised them by their themes, and tried to understand how these t…
Authoritarian Cooptation of Civil Society
In Belarus, a vibrant civil society coexisted for the better part of the past decade with a firmly entrenched autocracy in a depoliticised cooptation mode. Through cooptation, the energy of civil society was channelled from representing a threat to the regime into being its resource. However, the capacity developed by civil society during this period of political inactivity was quickly redeployed for political purposes at the junction of economic…
Forum
It has been a year since the Russian invasion of Ukraine started. It is clear that the impact of this war goes far beyond Ukraine. We already know that it will have long-lasting consequences for the regional and global economy, in particular for energy and food security. The war is reshuffling old geo-political arrangements and alliances. It is also shaping the political landscapes of European states: international relations, inflation and migrat…
An Estonian-Russian Language Club as a Venue for Grassroots Ethnic Integration
One third of Estonian residents identify Russian as their mother tongue, and despite having lived in Estonia for decades, many of them are not fluent in the Estonian language and choose to remain stateless rather than obtain Estonian citizenship by passing the state language exam. Ethnic segregation in Estonia continues to be a matter of bitter political debate, not least in the context of tensions with neighboring Russia and pressure from the EU…
Why All Dictators Have Moustaches
Based on the repertoire of Belarusian oral political jokes collected between 2011 and 2013, this article compares contemporary Belarusian humor to the earlier Socialist and contemporary non-Belarusian jokes. During this study, I discovered that Belarusian oral jokes mostly have versions created through various schemes of adaptation in other countries and about other figures (not necessarily political). The continuity goes far beyond the exchange …
Vaccine Hesitancy Counter Memes
This essay is part of a forum that includes Tom Mould's article "Counter Memes and Anti-Legends in Online Welfare Discourse" (2022) and response essays published in this issue ("Memes and Representations of Race: An Analysis of Historical Representations of Welfare" by Mia Moody-Ramirez and "In a Land of Venn Diagrams: Reflections on Anti-Fans and Counter Memes, Trolls and Anti-Legends" by Whitney Phillips)
Ferroconcrete cases, sausage migrants, and Santa Barbara
In this article, I present the results of my fieldwork among refugees and asylum seekers in Estonia. I start with an explanation of the refugee situation in Estonia and its public perception which mainly concentrates on Asian and African refugees. Then, the article focuses on a large yet overlooked group of asylum seekers from post-Soviet countries, the reasons they have for coming to Estonia, and the main discussions among them on the asylum pro…
Soviet meta-jokes
This article provides the first published collection and analysis of Soviet meta-jokes, accompanied by a review of meta-joke research, and a discussion of the ways that scholars have understood the term. As far as possible, the Soviet meta-jokes published here appear in chronological order with the goal of showing how, with the help of certain intertextual links, these jokes reflected political and historical changes in joke-telling culture. Sovi…
Veyshnoria
As a humorous response to the threat of the Russian occupation of Belarus during the joint military exercise of September 2017, civic activists created the fictional Republic of Veyshnoria. This meme soon obtained all the attributes of a micro-nation, including numerous virtual citizens, serving to critique the autocratic government of Belarus and creating a platform for alternative nation-building. Via humor and fake news, fictional Veyshnoria i…
In Search for Truth
In this article, I analyze rumors about surveillance-unverified expressions of belief and narratives, which, despite their global omnipresence, are contextualized by local peculiarities and modalities. I concentrate on the narratives recorded in Belarus, notoriously referred to as "the last dictatorship of Europe." There, the rumors, largely inherited from the USSR, are reiterated due to the nontransparency of current legislation and other featur…
Conspiratorial Thinking among Russian Speakers in Estonia
This research stems from ethnographic interviews about COVID-19 conspiracy theories that uncovered that the interviewees (members of the Russophone minority residing in Estonia) perceived a significant connection between the pandemic and the war in Ukraine. I analyze major themes that bring two conspiracy theories together, one theory about the pandemic and the other about the war in Ukraine-and other narratives that tend to gravitate toward them…
When the President Comes Potemkinist Order as an Alternative to Democracy in Belarus
The Potemkin village is a metaphor for the cases of conscious, yet false construction or beautification for the sake of presenting something as better than it is, usually in front of high officials. Enumerating multiple cases and possible applications of the term (and its synonyms), I base my research on Belarus, a former Soviet and still socialist independent state governed by the same president since 1994. Going there for fieldwork at least twi…
Political Biography
This research focuses on Belarus, a former Soviet republic that elected its first president, Alexander Lukashenko, in 1994. Lukashenko has ruled ever since, causing the country to become notorious as the last dictatorship in Europe. Having inherited a state system that was still socialist, Belarus enthusiastically preserved numerous Soviet elements of economics, politics, and everyday life. Within this context Lukashenko’s official biography port…
Counter-hegemony in today's Belarus
Tackling the role of state symbols in negotiating national identity and political development, this research focuses on Belarus where the alternative white-red-white flag became instrumental in protests against the dominant political discourse. Since 1995, oppositional mass media have been reporting about cases of this tricolor being erected in hard-to-reach and/or politically sensitive places. These actions were mainly attributed to some “Miron,…
De-abbreviations
The article is dedicated to the study of ludic de-abbreviation, backronymization, or, alternatively, humorous decoding of the well-known abbreviations (which usually serve as names for political parties, countries, universities, and so on). A brief survey of the existing research is provided. Then, despite the fact that de-abbreviation was considered characteristic of the Soviet period, now almost extinct, the author focuses on a case study based…
To what Extent are Jokes Reactional? (Based on a Joke Cycle about Yury Luzhkov's Dismissal)
The article concentrates on jokes that appeared immediately after the dismissal of Yury Luzhkov, Mayor of Moscow, in 2010. As soon as he was fired after eighteen years in the same position of mayor, the Internet was flooded with jokes about his dismissal as well as numerous discussions on internet forums and blogs. I collected the jokes as well as opinions from the discussions, categorised them by their themes, and tried to understand how these t…
Why All Dictators Have Moustaches
Based on the repertoire of Belarusian oral political jokes collected between 2011 and 2013, this article compares contemporary Belarusian humor to the earlier Socialist and contemporary non-Belarusian jokes. During this study, I discovered that Belarusian oral jokes mostly have versions created through various schemes of adaptation in other countries and about other figures (not necessarily political). The continuity goes far beyond the exchange …
Political Biography
This research focuses on Belarus, a former Soviet republic that elected its first president, Alexander Lukashenko, in 1994. Lukashenko has ruled ever since, causing the country to become notorious as the last dictatorship in Europe. Having inherited a state system that was still socialist, Belarus enthusiastically preserved numerous Soviet elements of economics, politics, and everyday life. Within this context Lukashenko’s official biography port…
Counter-hegemony in today's Belarus
Tackling the role of state symbols in negotiating national identity and political development, this research focuses on Belarus where the alternative white-red-white flag became instrumental in protests against the dominant political discourse. Since 1995, oppositional mass media have been reporting about cases of this tricolor being erected in hard-to-reach and/or politically sensitive places. These actions were mainly attributed to some “Miron,…
When the President Comes Potemkinist Order as an Alternative to Democracy in Belarus
The Potemkin village is a metaphor for the cases of conscious, yet false construction or beautification for the sake of presenting something as better than it is, usually in front of high officials. Enumerating multiple cases and possible applications of the term (and its synonyms), I base my research on Belarus, a former Soviet and still socialist independent state governed by the same president since 1994. Going there for fieldwork at least twi…
In Search for Truth
In this article, I analyze rumors about surveillance-unverified expressions of belief and narratives, which, despite their global omnipresence, are contextualized by local peculiarities and modalities. I concentrate on the narratives recorded in Belarus, notoriously referred to as "the last dictatorship of Europe." There, the rumors, largely inherited from the USSR, are reiterated due to the nontransparency of current legislation and other featur…
Rumor, Humor, and Other Forms of Election Folklore in Non-Democratic Societies
This article focuses on folk expressions on "the election without choice", as the state elections in authoritarian societies are often labeled.The research is based on the case of Belarus, where the electoral fraud has become a matter of common knowledge both for the Belarusians themselves and outside observers.Yet, even though the independent opinion polls are not exactly as positive for the Belarusian president as the official results of the el…
Veyshnoria
As a humorous response to the threat of the Russian occupation of Belarus during the joint military exercise of September 2017, civic activists created the fictional Republic of Veyshnoria. This meme soon obtained all the attributes of a micro-nation, including numerous virtual citizens, serving to critique the autocratic government of Belarus and creating a platform for alternative nation-building. Via humor and fake news, fictional Veyshnoria i…
Conspiracy Theories in Eastern Europe
Ferroconcrete cases, sausage migrants, and Santa Barbara
In this article, I present the results of my fieldwork among refugees and asylum seekers in Estonia. I start with an explanation of the refugee situation in Estonia and its public perception which mainly concentrates on Asian and African refugees. Then, the article focuses on a large yet overlooked group of asylum seekers from post-Soviet countries, the reasons they have for coming to Estonia, and the main discussions among them on the asylum pro…
Soviet meta-jokes
This article provides the first published collection and analysis of Soviet meta-jokes, accompanied by a review of meta-joke research, and a discussion of the ways that scholars have understood the term. As far as possible, the Soviet meta-jokes published here appear in chronological order with the goal of showing how, with the help of certain intertextual links, these jokes reflected political and historical changes in joke-telling culture. Sovi…
Humor and Rumor in the Post-Soviet Authoritarian State
Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Belarus, an example of an authoritarian state, Humor and Rumor in the Post-Soviet Authoritarian State presents over one hundred contemporary political jokes in the contexts of their performance. Throughout, Anastasiya Astapova demonstrates the salience of the joke genre, the multiplicity of humor manifestations, and the fundamental presence of intertextual links between jokes and another folk genre—rumor. Info…
Waterlow, Jonathan
Authoritarian Cooptation of Civil Society
In Belarus, a vibrant civil society coexisted for the better part of the past decade with a firmly entrenched autocracy in a depoliticised cooptation mode. Through cooptation, the energy of civil society was channelled from representing a threat to the regime into being its resource. However, the capacity developed by civil society during this period of political inactivity was quickly redeployed for political purposes at the junction of economic…
An Estonian-Russian Language Club as a Venue for Grassroots Ethnic Integration
One third of Estonian residents identify Russian as their mother tongue, and despite having lived in Estonia for decades, many of them are not fluent in the Estonian language and choose to remain stateless rather than obtain Estonian citizenship by passing the state language exam. Ethnic segregation in Estonia continues to be a matter of bitter political debate, not least in the context of tensions with neighboring Russia and pressure from the EU…
Vaccine Hesitancy Counter Memes
This essay is part of a forum that includes Tom Mould's article "Counter Memes and Anti-Legends in Online Welfare Discourse" (2022) and response essays published in this issue ("Memes and Representations of Race: An Analysis of Historical Representations of Welfare" by Mia Moody-Ramirez and "In a Land of Venn Diagrams: Reflections on Anti-Fans and Counter Memes, Trolls and Anti-Legends" by Whitney Phillips)
Injecting fun? Humour, conspiracy theory and (anti)vaccination discourse in popular media
Conspiracy theories have accompanied vaccination since its mass introduction, circulating, among other forms, in humour – such as cartoons, and now, memes. Importantly, humour has targeted both vaccination and anti-vaccination stances. In this study, we discuss the peculiarities of humorous content within the vaccination debate and uncover the most popular thematic categories, forms and logical mechanisms of humour. We show that humorous and seri…
Conspiratorial Thinking among Russian Speakers in Estonia
This research stems from ethnographic interviews about COVID-19 conspiracy theories that uncovered that the interviewees (members of the Russophone minority residing in Estonia) perceived a significant connection between the pandemic and the war in Ukraine. I analyze major themes that bring two conspiracy theories together, one theory about the pandemic and the other about the war in Ukraine-and other narratives that tend to gravitate toward them…
Forum
It has been a year since the Russian invasion of Ukraine started. It is clear that the impact of this war goes far beyond Ukraine. We already know that it will have long-lasting consequences for the regional and global economy, in particular for energy and food security. The war is reshuffling old geo-political arrangements and alliances. It is also shaping the political landscapes of European states: international relations, inflation and migrat…
Ethnic segregation of consumption in Estonia
The segregation of consumption between the Russian- and Estonian-speaking populations residing in Estonia has been common knowledge in the popular imagination, mass media publications, and academic papers. Rather than undertaking an impossible mission to identify whether these narratives are true, in this article, I show how this repertoire of stories has fostered special marketing strategies and document the emergence of a special marketing nich…
Combatting conspiracy theories (also via humour)
This article focuses on popular understandings of how to combat conspiracy theories. Our case study is an Estonian-language Facebook group, “Victory of Light! Continuation”, which was founded in the middle of the pandemic. This group exemplifies a case of social media activism, bringing together people dedicated to fighting disinformation by reporting on and trolling those who spread it. Based on online fieldwork and an interview with the group’s…
Why We Tell Stories
Navigating Post-truth
Political science (18 obras) · Law (16 obras) · Sociology (15 obras) · Politics (12 obras) · Art (10 obras) · History (10 obras) · Law (10 obras) · Literature (8 obras) · Democracy (7 obras) · Eastern European Communism and Reforms (7 obras)