About

Maria Sidorkina is an Assistant Professor in the Liberal Arts at the University of Texas at Austin. Her research focuses on protest and collective action, political communication, illiberalism, and issues related to post-Soviet Eurasia, including Russia. She employs digital ethnography and studies language and interaction within her areas of interest. Her work contributes to understanding political dynamics and social movements in the context of illiberal regimes and post-Soviet societies.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Law
• Sociology
• Artificial Intelligence
• Computer Science
• Anthropology
• Linguistics
• Philosophy
• Gender studies
• History
• Mathematics

Selected publications

• Everyday Politics in Russia: From Resentment to Resistance by JeremyMorris. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2025. 264 pp. $90.00. ISBN 978‐1‐350‐50932‐0

  The Russian Review · 2026-02-18

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• “You're Soviet trash!—You're a liberass!”: The political life of social slurs

  Journal of Linguistic Anthropology · 2025-02-27 · 1 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract This paper is about “social slurs,” or dysphemisms for collectivities and their members. Social slurs thrived in Russian politicized milieus of the 2010s, during the “two Russias culture war.” Examples of social slurs include mrakobesy , vatninki , bydlo (used for Putin supporters), and liberasty , demshiza , kreakly (used for regime opponents). For the benefit of US readers, these can be idiomatically translated as ignoramuses, rubes, sheeple, and liberasses, democrazies, bobos. In Russia, social slurs have been employed to attribute characteristics of enregistered social personae to both political supporters and opponents of the regime. These attributions, in turn, have been used to evaluate the conduct of participants in public life against the norms of interaction rituals central to modern political imaginaries.

  PublisherDOI

• <i>A Chto Sluchilos'?</i>: Ethnographies of Holding It Together

  The Russian Review · 2023 · 1 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Political Science
  • Sociology

  Abstract This essay by sociocultural anthropologists of Russia working in the North American academy considers rupture in three ways. First, we review rupture as a theoretical concept that ethnographers have both used and contested in making sense of the end of the Soviet Union, to inform our reading of the present moment. Second, we think about what political and social relationships the war has made speakable and for whom, at a time when the possibilities of free expression in Russia carry novel risks. Anthropologists working with indigenous and ethnic minorities in Russia have long insisted on the country’s internal plurality. Drawing on this scholarship, we discuss the ways in which plurality has been freshly repoliticized in the context of the war in Ukraine, while carrying forward some of the legacies of its Soviet orchestration. Third, we observe that the 2022 invasion of Ukraine marks a rupture for ethnographers in the way we do fieldwork in and of Russia. In response, we call for a scholarly praxis of suturing together multiple scales of analysis, digital and geographic locations and incommensurable perspectives.

  PublisherDOI

• Political Culture in Russia: From “Grammars of Engagement” to Registers of Talk

  Nationalities Papers · 2020

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Computer Science
  • Political Science
  • Computer Science

  An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content.

  PublisherDOI

• “Shining a Light” on Us and Them: Public-Making in Ordinary Russia

  Ab imperio · 2015-01-01 · 5 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  SUMMARY: What ideas and practices do ordinary Russians draw upon to mobilize public opinion in the struggle against the corrupt “system” (sistema) of police officials? In this article, I consider a case of social contention in Novosibirsk in 2013–14, which followed the death of a young woman in an accident involving a traffic police officer. The dynamics of contention I attend to suggest that Russia today has the social conditions for politically efficacious publics. In my analysis, I identify several strategies of “public-making” that take these conditions into account, to conjure a collective subject and “call out” to the constituencies that could give this subject legitimacy. The communicative styles I attend to are embedded in local histories of activism, and resonate with what we know about protest dynamics in Russia today. Drawing on literature that has urged thinking outside normative paradigms of the public sphere, I consider these “technologies of persuasion” as indicative of neither “liberal” nor “illiberal” regimes of textual circulation. Instead, I suggest, that as in the liberal models of stranger sociability, public-making in Novosibirsk presupposed a moral common sense, joint attention to a space of common discourse, and openness to potential strangers. However, it also required a different kind of political work. In addition to addressing potential strangers, activists had to persuade the potentially immoral “them” to set aside particular social interests, and recognize their shared footing with “us” with respect to self-evident actualities. На какие идеи и практики полагаются обычные россияне для моби-лизации общественного мнения на борьбу с коррумпированной поли-цейской системой? В настоящей статье разбирается случай социального противостояния, имевший место в Новосибирске в 2013−14 гг., после гибели молодой женщины в ДТП с участием офицера полиции. Про-слеженная автором динамика противостояния позволяет предположить, что в сегодняшней России есть социальные условия для появления политически эффективной общественности. Автор идентифицирует несколько стратегий “конструирования общественности” с использова-нием этих условий, фокусируясь на создании коллективного субъекта, выступающего от имени групп, наделяющих его легитимностью. Стиль коммуникации, анализируемый в статье, связан с местной историей активизма и соответствует тому, что мы знаем о протестной динамике в сегодняшней России. Развивая подходы, стимулирующие выход за пределы нормативных парадигм публичной сферы, автор отказывается классифицировать эти “технологии убеждения” как индикаторы “либерального” или “нелиберального” режима текстуальной циркуляции. С одной стороны, в соответствии с либеральными моделями социабиль-ности чужаков, конструирование общественности в Новосибирске основывается на предполагаемом разделяемом всеми моральном здравом смысле, совместном внимании к пространству общего дискурса и открытости потенциальным чужакам. В то же время, оно требует иного типа политической работы. Помимо обращения к потенциальным чужакам, активисты должны убедить потенциально имморальных “их” отказаться от определенных социальных интересов и признать, на основании очевидных фактов, общую базу с “нами”.

  PublisherDOI

• The Patriotism of Despair: Nation, War, and Loss in Russia (Serguei Alex. Oushakine)

  Indiana Magazine of History (Indiana University) · 2011-05-06

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  Publisher

Frequent coauthors

• Cassandra Hartblay

  The Scarborough Hospital

  1 shared

• Tatiana Chudakova

  Tufts University

  1 shared