Mural by artist Blu, photographed by the author in Berlin, Germany December 2013
Dr. Alexis Lerner presents her book Post-Soviet Graffiti: Free Speech in Authoritarian States, the culmination of a decade of fieldwork across the post-Soviet and post-Communist European regions.
The book explores graffiti as both a subversive tool for challenging power and a medium co-opted by regimes to manipulate public perception and project state narratives. Drawing on longitudinal and cross-sectional analyses, it offers the first systematic, comparative look at how political street art becomes a contested space between dissent and control under authoritarian rule.
This event is co-sponsored with the UBC Department of Political Science. Free lunch from Jamjar will be served for all those that RSVP to attend in-person. Those that wish to attend online can register for the Zoom link below.
Bio
Dr. Alexis Lerner is an award-winning scholar of intersection authoritarianism and dissent, with a regional focus on Russia and the post-Soviet region. She is an assistant professor of Political Science at the United States Naval Academy and the author of Post-Soviet Graffiti: Free Speech in Authoritarian States (University of Toronto Press, 2025). Dr. Lerner’s current research examines how education can strengthen democracy by arming students against disinformation and misinformation.
