Jonathan Larson
Visiting Professor of Anthropology
jonathan-larson@uiowa.edu
Background:
My research has focused on discourses of critical thinking, the practice of civic criticism, and the ethics of critical communities in Eastern Europe both during and after socialism. I have recently revised for publication my book manuscript on this research, titled Critical Thinking after Socialism: Public Discourse and Educating for Democracy in Slovakia. Based in two kinds of field sites—settings of public debate and secondary and tertiary classrooms—it is an ethnographic, historical, and tacitly comparative study of how Slovaks have learned and practiced criticism of and in the name of society over the past half century. It responds to locally and globally emergent liberal projects of civil society and educational development that were tested in post-socialist Europe up into the first half of the past decade and since exported to other parts of the globe. Synthesizing multiple tools and methods of linguistic anthropology, I show that attention to the interactive layering of social life in this context encourages us to re-examine the discursive basis upon which populations get evaluated as un-critical in comparison to an imagined West. It helps us appreciate what features of one-party rule impact socially emergent critical thought and discursive citizenship.
I have recently been broadening my understanding of academic engagement, ethnography, and the intersubjective practice of critical thinking through funded historical research and work outside of the classroom. My current new project explores alternative media and the importance of sentiment on ethics of public criticism in a milieu extremely significant for Western theories of civil society: late socialist Czechoslovakia. In what ways did Czech intellectuals and artists such as Václav Havel believe or demonstrate that different social spaces made intimacies, and critical discourse about rights and a just society, possible? In what ways did forms of alienation seem disempowering? I am preparing for publication two articles from this research. One outcome of this project will be to improve my understanding of samizdat—or self-published—sources from the period in order to look in a more historically informed manner at current forms of social criticism taking place in new media, a subject I have integrated into my teaching.
Further interests include sociocultural ideas about labor and transparency, as well as the politics of language variation and national identity in Europe.
| Courses Taught: Language, Culture, and Communication |
Affiliations & Links Center for Russian, Eastern European, and Eurasia Studies |
