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Performing the ‘Good Russian’: Exile, Gender, and Belonging in the Shadow of War:

What happens when refusing to fight a war is framed not as a moral stand but as a betrayal of masculinity itself? This dissertation examines how Russian male exiles who left after the 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine are constructed as both political and gendered failures. While exile is often understood as a legal or geographic condition, the student argues that in the Russian context, it operates as a symbolic tool of gender discipline. Through state media, propaganda, and popular discourse, male exiles are portrayed not simply as dissenters but as morally deviant, feminized, and queer-coded figures who have forfeited their claims to state-recognized masculinity. Drawing on ethnographic interviews, participant observation, and media analysis, this project introduces the concept of exile as gendered death - a process through which refusal to participate in state-defined masculinity and war-making results in the symbolic unmaking of the male subject. It also theorizes a post-performative shift in the Russian state’s approach to loyalty. Before the war, publicly performing ideological and gender norms was often enough to avoid repression. Today, the state demands full emotional and embodied allegiance. In this new condition, refusal to fight is not just disobedience; it is treated as a fundamental failure of citizenship, morality, and manhood. Focusing on Russian exiles in Georgia, a country shaped by its postcolonial relationship with Russia, this dissertation shows how masculinity becomes both a target of authoritarian violence and a fragile claim to legitimacy in exile. It offers new insight into how gender, dissent, and mobility are reshaped under the pressures of war and authoritarian rule.

Enmeshment Aesthetics: Social Media, Materiality, and Mobility in Chiang Mai, Thailand:

This presentation situates the city of Chiang Mai in Thailand as a social media-oriented site for imagining oneself as part of the global and cosmopolitan consumer culture. Aesthetically-pleasing coffee houses, restaurants, and consumption venues with foreign decorations and menu options have become Thai social media content creators’ backgrounds for content making. Hopping between these sites to make review posts/videos on Facebook and Instagram is a trendy phenomenon that gives rise to what the student calls ‘enmeshment aesthetics’. This enmeshment aesthetics illustrates how consumption landscapes allow the sense of global selfhood and mobility to emerge through the physical movements in spaces, the consumption of foods and drinks, and the mediatization of those experiences. Here, social media connects human, non-human (objects, foods, drinks, spaces), and media technologies by blurring the national, cultural, socio-economic, spatial, and even ontological boundaries. Weaving together Thai studies, media studies, new materialism, and urban studies, this presentation demonstrates how Thai consumers utilize social media to construct their desired global self-image, turning Thai consumption landscapes into global, cosmopolitan, and enmeshment aesthetics.

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