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The project’s overarching goal is to explore the changing relationship between music, politics, and anti-war protest by studying Russian musical exile following Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine.  

The RUMEX project addresses the role of contemporary popular music in times of war and crisis and the shifting meanings of popular music in exile in the digital age. Much hope is currently invested in the potentialities of Russian popular music in exile as a site of anti-war resistance. Emerging in the context of wartime repression and censorship, this music is associated with political dissent and hopes for social change.  

The RUMEX project has three goals: 

1. Mapping the infrastructures that support Russian music in exile across urban and digital sites 
2. Analyzing how exile is performed in exilic cultural productions (on social media and in music videos, concert recordings, interviews, inetrviews etc.) 
3. Theorizing how the politics of anti-war protest of Russian musical exile relates to the dynamics of Empire, race, and gender/sexuality.  

RUMEX combines an ethnography of the infrastructures that sustain Russian musical exile across 7 urban hubs (Berlin, Belgrade, London, Yerevan, Amsterdam, and Vilnius), and (2) digital platforms with a multimodal discourse analysis of exilic cultural productions (music videos, interviews, films).  

RUMEX embraces the twofold approach to the infrastructures of Russian musical exile, combining the study of exilic music scenes across 7 urban hubs (interviews and participant observations) with an examination of digital music platforms with their own infrastructural logics. 

Firstly, the project’s approach to the infrastructures of exile centers on the invisible relations of production and the vital labor of cultural workers (beat makers, directors, producers, managers), organizing music making in new locations, as well as the role of record labels, performance venues, and studios in the respective sites of exile. 

Secondly, the intrinsic part of these infrastructures of exile is digital/streaming platforms such as YouTube, and popular music shows hosted on these platforms. Digital platforms as infrastructures do not merely enable the circulation of music but significantly reshape the relationships between musicians and their fans, places, and identities, and between content and consumption (Magaudda 2020). These infrastructures of exile enable multiple and contradictory exilic flows. 

RUMEX uses an innovative interdisciplinary theoretical framework that combines post-colonial Russian studies, gender studies, and popular music and media research.  

RUMEX is hosted by the Department of Musicology at the University of Uppsala, one of the largest musicology departments in the Nordics, with a vibrant research milieu and a broad focus on music history, music theory, and an emergent profile in popular music. The project’s base is the University of Bergen, Center for Women’s and Gender Research, with broad interdisciplinary expertise in post-colonial feminist theory, migration scholarship, and critical race, gender, and sexuality research.