Working Group Popular Culture

Popular culture is a significant arena in which contemporary societies negotiate identities, political conflicts, social transformations, and relationships to the past. Established in January 2026 within the framework of the project Adjustment and Radicalisation: Dynamics in Popular Culture(s) in Pre-War Eastern Europe, the Popular Culture Working Group provides a forum for discussing recent and influential theoretical work on popular and media culture. Meeting approximately once a month, the group focuses on questions of cultural production and circulation, fandom and participation, digital and platform cultures, history and memory, political appropriation, nationalism, populism, and the broader transformations of modernity.

 

The group brings together researchers working on contemporary literature, video games, online culture and vlogging, fashion, comics and graphic novels, stand-up comedy, music theater, popular music, and other forms of contemporary popular culture in Central and Eastern Europe. Rather than treating the region as an isolated field of study, the group seeks to place research on Central and Eastern Europe in dialogue with wider debates in cultural and media theory, to compare approaches across different media and contexts, and to create an interdisciplinary space for developing shared theoretical questions.