CARGC Annabelle Sreberny Distinguished Lecture

"Illiberal Fantasies: Political Worldbuilding in Semi-Peripheral European Media"

The contradictory combination of market capitalism and populist nationalism at the core of contemporary “authoritarian neoliberal” or “entrepreneurial authoritarian” states has posed a challenge to the traditional research methods of the humanities and social sciences. Most of the attempts across the disciplines to understand the success of such hybrid populist formations have yielded partial explanations. I locate the key to illiberal, populist states’ simultaneous pursuit of global, market-based and local, populist-nativist agendas in their reliance on narrative, fantasy-based worldbuilding. Such an approach explains the internal coherence of right-wing universes, their organization along a binary culture-war structure, and their availability for local adaptation as they travel across global digital networks. I illustrate the mechanisms of contemporary right-wing political worldbuilding through a focus on Eastern Europe, a semi-peripheral region where nationalisms and nation-states have been historically dependent on outside projections and narrative fantasies, which autocratic leaders have repeatedly exploited. My focus is on global patterns of Eastern European “digital nationalism” circulating through news, social and fictional media platforms, where the infrastructures of production and distribution are in synergy with the phantasmatic narrative content produced.

About the Speaker

Anikó Imre is a Professor in the School of Cinematic Arts of the University of Southern California. She works in comparative media studies and global communication, with a focus on (post)socialist media industries and cultures in relation to the politics of popular culture, digital surveillance and identity. Imre is the author or (co-)editor of seven books, including TV Socialism (Duke UP, 2016), Identity Games: Globalization and the Transformation of Media Cultures in the New Europe (MIT Press, 2011) and, most recently, the collection Off White: Central and Eastern Europe and the Global History of Race (with Catherine Baker, Bogdan Christian Iacob and James Mark, Manchester University Press, 2024). Imre co-edits the Palgrave book series Global Cinemas and sits on the boards of Global Media and Communication, Television and New Media, VIEW Journal of European Television History and Culture, NECSUS_European Journal of Media Studies, and global-e: Twenty-First Century Global Dynamics, among other journals. She is the recipient of the inaugural SIGNS Catharine Stimpson Prize for Outstanding Feminist Scholarship, USC’s Mellon Mentoring Fellowship, a senior research Fulbright fellowship and a Central European University Institute of Advanced Studies fellowship. In 2025-26, she is a Harvard Radcliffe Fellow, working on a project on the role of storytelling, worldbuilding and fantasy in “competitive authoritarian” media ecologies.

About Annabelle Sreberny

Annabelle Sreberny was a British academic, writer, anti-fascist activist, mother and grandmother. Her work focused on globalization, communication, and culture, often through a feminist lens and with close attention to digital communication and Iran. Annabelle authored several books, among them: The World of the News: The News of the World (University of Leicester, 1980), Small Media, Big Revolution: Communication, Culture, and the Iranian Revolution with Ali Mohammadi (University of Minnesota Press, 1994), Questioning the Media: a Critical Introduction (1995, edited, with John Downing and Ali Mohammadi), Blogistan: The Internet and Politics in Iran with Gholam Khiabany (I.B. Tauris, 2011), and Cultural Revolution in Iran: Contemporary Popular Culture in the Islamic Republic with Massoumeh Torfeh (I.B. Tauris, 2013).

Annabelle was the Director of the Centre for Mass Communication Research at the University of Leicester from 1992-1999. In 2004 she joined SOAS as Visiting Professor and took up the first chair in Global Media and Communications in 2006. She was one of the founding members and the first Chair of the Centre for Iranian Studies at SOAS. In July 2008 Annabelle was elected president of IAMCR for four years. She was an Associate Member of the UNESCO ORBICOM Network and an elected member of the Royal Society of Arts since 2001. Annabelle retired from SOAS in September 2015 where she remained Emeritus Professor of Global Media and Communication.
She also sat on the board of Article 19, an organization dedicated to defending freedom of expression, and The British Shalom-Salaam Trust, a charity that supports grassroots projects to foster community relations in Israel and Palestine. She was a true internationalist, anti-fascist and anti-Zionist activist, working closely with Jews for Justice for Palestinians (JJP) and Jewish Voice for Labour in the UK.