Rein Raud

Rein Raud is the Distinguished Professor of Asian and Cultural Studies at the School of Humanities, Tallinn University. His circle of research interests is broad and ranges from cultural semiotics and sociology to process philosophy and theories of the subject on the one hand, and various aspects of Asian and Western cultural history on the other. His academic books include Being in Flux: A Post-Anthropocentric Ontology of the Self (Polity, 2021), Asian Worldviews: Religions, Philosophies, Political Theories (Wiley-Blackwell 20121), Meaning in Action: Outline of an Integral Theory of Culture (Polity 2016) and Practices of Selfhood (together with Zygmunt Bauman, Polity 2015). The goal of the present project is to analyze the political, social and cultural discourses that have contributed to the formation of the post-Soviet political subject in its various forms, notably in Russia. Drawing on his theories of selfhood and subjectivity, Rein Raud intends to show how Russian/Soviet culturally specific discourses of subjectivity have contributed to the formation of the present situation in which Russian imperalism is reborn and cordially endorsed by many Russian citizens in an increasingly totalitarian form.