Research — Dr. Alexis M. Lerner

BOOK >> Post-Soviet Graffiti: Free Speech in Authoritarian States

For more than a decade, Alexis Lerner combed the alleyways, underpasses, and public squares of cities once under communist rule, from Berlin in the west to Vladivostok in the east, recording thousands of cases of critical and satirical political street art and cataloging these artworks linguistically and thematically across space and time. Complemented by first-hand interviews with leading artists, activists, and politicians from across the region, Post-Soviet Graffiti provides theoretical reflection on public space as a site for political action, a semiotic reading of signs and symbols, and street art as a form of text.
The book answers the question of how we conceptualize avenues of dissent under authoritarian rule by showing how contemporary graffiti functions not only as a popular public aesthetic, but also as a mouthpiece of political sentiment, especially within the post-Soviet region and post-communist Europe. A purposefully anonymous and accessible artform, graffiti is an effective tool for circumventing censorship and expressing political views. This is especially true for marginalized populations and for those living in otherwise closed and censored states.
Post-Soviet Graffiti reveals that graffiti does not exist in a vacuum; rather, it can be read as a narrative about a place, the people who live there, and the things that matter to them.

Across Canada and in the majority of U.S. states, genocide education is not yet a curricular requirement. While some teachers introduce Holocaust education through history or literature, many students first encounter the Holocaust and other state-sanctioned and systematic mass murders through nontraditional sources, such as though comic books, social media accounts, video games, and television shows. I use a pre/post-treatment survey design to assess what 3,593 teens across Canada and the United States know and think about the Holocaust and antisemitism. My treatment was a two-day virtual conference called Education Days, organized by the Holocaust education not-for-profit organization Liberation75. I conclude that while students have a basic understanding of antisemitism and the Holocaust, they have nevertheless been impacted by Holocaust denial and would benefit from educational mandates. I propose that Holocaust educational mandates are adopted in the Province of Ontario.

“Analyzing Holocaust Archives Through a Quantitative Lens.” The Routledge Handbook of Religion and Genocide. Edited by Sara E. Brown and Stephen Smith. Abingdon: Routledge. (2022)
“Partizaning, Various Interventions. Moscow.” Out of Time, Out of Place: Public Art (Now). Edited by Clare Doherty. London: Thames and Hudson. (2015)

“On the Run: Opposition Candidate Behavior in Hybrid Authoritarian Regimes” (with Colleen Wood)
“A Conceptual Primer on the Systemic Opposition in the Authoritarian Context” (with Colleen Wood)
“Is Scholarly Track-Two Diplomacy Effective in an Age of US-Russia Tensions?”
Dissent Management in Authoritarian States
“Can Armchair Activism Reduce Repression of Political Opposition Candidates in Autocratic States?”
“Social Media Disinformation and Holocaust Denial Among North American Teens”

My dissertation addresses the theme of authoritarian state control, asking which political opposition candidates running for president encounter targeted state repression. In “The Calculus of Dissent Management in Authoritarian States,” I amass the professional biographies of over 4,100 potential presidential candidates across the post-Soviet region from 1991-2018. Using an original dataset and a mixed-methods approach that includes both quantitative modeling and in-depth case studies, I show that incumbent presidents in autocratic states are less likely to repress independent candidates with robust foreign ties. This implies that popular opinion in one nation can influence the fate of a candidate in another. This project contributes to big questions in the field—most salient, how do autocratic leaders perceive and respond to political threats? My research also contributes methodologically, as I develop an innovative method for studying the nuances of authoritarian elections and behavior under conditions of limited information.