Robison Lecture

By Summer Studstill '17

Russian-American journalist Masha Gessen gave the fall Robison Lecture, co-sponsored by the Bradley University Department of Communications, the Women’s and Gender Studies Program, and the Intellectual and Cultural Activities Committee. Gessen, who immigrated to the United States from Russia in the early 1980s as a teenager, is known for her hard-hitting analysis of Vladmir Putin’s rise to power.

Her history of the radical art collective, Pussy Riot, and the group’s prosecution and imprisonment by the Russian government after they staged a punk prayer in the largest Orthodox church in Moscow, placed gender and sexuality at the center of the machinations of Putin’s autocratic government. Gessen’s most recent book, The Future is History (2017), analyzes the rise of autocracy in Russia after 1991, examining specifically how political change impacted four people as they realized they would not have a future in a democratic Russia.

Gessen framed her lecture attended by an audience of over 300, around the theme of journalistic imagination. Before the 2016 election, she explained, many of her American-born friends simply “could not imagine” Donald Trump winning the Republican nomination nor could they fathom a reality in which Trump would become president.

Unlike her friends, Gessen concluded that Donald Trump would indeed become president. This wasn’t intuition, rather, Gessen explained, it was the product of “a catastrophic imagination that comes from living in Russia under the Soviet Union and as a journalist under Putin.” Gessen acknowledges that she, with her “catastrophic imagination,” is in the minority. As an exile and an outsider moving back and forth between Russia and the United States, she gained a unique perspective, enabling her to draw similarities between Trump and Putin, such as how the two politicians use language to secure and express their political power.

Gessen cautioned that people need to look toward the future even if what they imagine is difficult to swallow. The opposite of imagination, she said, is fear; when people are limited by their imaginations for a hopeful future, they retreat into fear, nostalgia, and a longing for an imaginary past. Delia Bodem, a senior women’s and gender studies student in attendance, remarked that Gessen’s description of the catastrophic imagination gave her “a new way to picture the future of politics.”

Speaking to the future of journalism, Gessen parted by saying that journalists “are political actors and we can’t pretend that they aren’t. Everything they write and don’t write has political consequences.” She explained that marginalized journalists have always seen the political consequences of their work, but it is time to acknowledge that mainstream reporters are political actors as well. It is the responsibility of the journalist to report not just on “what is out there” but on “what potentialities are out there.” She left Bradley’s aspiring journalists with an inspiring admonition: “It is your job to exercise your imagination.

While on campus, Gessen conducted a question-and-answer style workshop for journalism and WGS students. The workshop covered diverse topics, with Gessen fielding students’ questions on her journalistic methodologies, how she frames her stories and interprets evidence, Trump’s relationship with the media and the relationship between activism and journalism. When asked how she continued to muster the courage to cover social protest, political crackdowns, wars, and autocratic regimes around the world, she told the audience, “It is necessary to experience fear to do things consciously.”

Robison Lecturer Masha Gessen (Photo provided by Mathew Moody).