Jonathan Larson
Visiting Professor of Anthropology
Office: 237 MH
Phone: (319) 335-0532
jonathan-larson@uiowa.edu
- Select Publications/Projects (PDF)
- Curriculum Vitae (PDF)
Background:
My work lies at the intersection of the political economy of language, the acquisition and practice of sociocultural knowledge, and sociocultural processes in time and space. My fieldwork has been in Martin and Bratislava, Slovakia in various sites of public culture and education. I have recently finished turning my dissertation into a book. The manuscript, Critical Society: Public Knowledge and the Ethics of Voice in Slovakia, is an ethnographic and historical study of public and social criticism over the past half century. Working across political and educational fields, it examines how sociocultural apprehensions of events, interactions, sentiment, and authority have informed local theories and practices of criticism. It advances a current anthropological critique of how Western models of critically disposed political subjectivities depend on post-Enlightenment suppositions regarding language and political voice.
I am beginning a new project on ways that social spaces and embodied sentiments influence public critical discourse. I wish to explore the reality behind common North American and East Central European views that “alienation” inhibits critical discourse, whereas “intimacy” facilitates it. One can see this juxtaposition in ideas of how state-directed modernist architecture and urban planning, schooling, and urban and institutional life in Eastern European state socialism facilitated control of local populations. I will work with films and other fictional and non-fictional Slovak and Czech accounts, particularly those that appeared in samizdat (self-published) circulation. An additional goal of this upcoming research is to deepen my understanding of socialist era samizdat forms of publics to prepare myself for a comparative look at blogging and electronically mediated publics in the former Czechoslovakia since 2005, when I finished my last long-term stay.
I continue to be interested in education in the former Czechoslovakia as part of thinking more broadly about the acquisition of sociocultural knowledge and about writing as a cultural practice. Further interests have included the semiotic ideologies that underlie the writing of curricula vitae from socialist to capitalist periods in Slovakia, and the politics of language standardization, national identity, and expertise in the former Czechoslovakia from the 19th to 20th centuries.
| Courses Taught: Language, Culture, and Communication |
Affiliations & Links Center for Russian, Eastern European, and Eurasia Studies The Immanent Frame: Secularism, Religion, and the Public Sphere Soyuz: The Research Network for Postsocialist Cultural Studies |
