During his year as a Townsend Fellow, Alexei Yurchak, Assistant Professor in Anthropology, will work on a project entitled "The Imaginary West of Soviet Socialism: Technologies and Networks of Non- Official Knowledge, 1950-1980’s." Based on ethnographic research conducted in St. Petersburg, Moscow, and several smaller Russian cities, Yurchak’s book analyzes how the production, organization and distribution of particular forms of ”nonofficial knowledge” in the Soviet Union in the period of late socialism contributed to the transformation of the attitudes, beliefs, and identities of Soviet people and enabled the subsequent unmaking of the Soviet system. Particularly important within such knowledge was the imaginary category of ”the West” which Yurchak found ubiquitous in visual representations, music recordings, material objects, clothes, linguistic expressions, etc. Not merely a form of opposition to the aims of Soviet ideology and not a simple manifestation of a desire for material goods, Soviet fascination with ”the West,” Yurchak argues, must be explored as a concept that was intrinsically and paradoxically bound with Soviet understandings and ideals of Communism.