Part of the "Overcoming Bipolarity: New Approaches to the Cold War" lecture series.

Alaina Lemon is a socio-cultural, linguistic, and historical anthropologist.   She tracks debates about communication and contact as they relate to material struggles over political and social change, especially as they affect the people of Russia, where she did years of fieldwork, and the Romani diaspora.  

Based on research on stages and on film sets, in markets and on the Metro, in kitchens and in front of television sets, her writing addresses divisions of phatic labor and of other communicative meta-labors; access to media infrastructures; ideologies of rupture and animation; affect/sentiment/emotion; and animal-human relations.