Publications

The ultimate source of inspiration for the present study is our ambition to offer a detailed description of the history of the Aramaic verbal system. A key event in this history is what Goldenberg used to call ‘the morphological revolution’, i.e. the shift, within Eastern Aramaic, from the Middle Aramaic2 verbal systems to those of Modern Aramaic. In the course of this shift, Eastern Aramaic gave up the inherited suffix conjugation3 (*qatala) and the prefix conjugation (*yaqtulu) and developed a new repertoire of verbal forms, all of whose bases were deverbal adjectives in earlier stages of Aramaic’s history.

In the era of post-truth and healthcare 2.0, when lay experts have equal credibility as medical professionals and when the internet challenges the techniques of seeking and gaining health information, healthcare systems are in need of change. The key to the path of systemic changes lies in un-knowing not only the ways health issues have been communicated, but also the very process of the production of meanings of health. In Russia, neglecting the critical assessment of communication strategies in healthcare (or, as the direct translation suggests, health protection), might well result in the field looking like the famous croquet game in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Reconciling the strategies of each “hedgehog” and each “flamingo” through a careful consideration of constantly fluctuating goals might be a much-needed shift to co-creation in Russian health communication.

In this chapter we discuss the messy meaning-making strategies (and their interactions) which characterize Russian health communication today. We open our discussion by situating the game field that produces the meaning of health in contemporary Russia. In this opening, we introduce the key health communicators (pharmaceuticals, governmental or regulatory actors, the institutional medical sector, health professionals, and patient NGOs and communities) and how they share the field. We then introduce the Russian national strategy of patient-oriented health protection and the contradictory meanings that each sector of communicators attaches to it. We elaborate on the mismatch in communication of patient-oriented health protection, discussing successes and failures of health communication practices in different sectors. We analyze how the government, activists, institutions, business, and medical professionals communicate their meanings, the place of other communicators in campaign planning and execution, and how flexible and interactive the practices of each communicator sector are. We conclude with propositions on how the road towards patient-oriented health protection can be built in Russia.

In the era of post-truth and healthcare 2.0, when lay experts have equal credibility as medical professionals and when the internet challenges the techniques of seeking and gaining health information, healthcare systems are in need of change. The key to the path of systemic changes lies in un-knowing not only the ways health issues have been communicated, but also the very process of the production of meanings of health. In Russia, neglecting the critical assessment of communication strategies in healthcare (or, as the direct translation suggests, health protection), might well result in the field looking like the famous croquet game in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Reconciling the strategies of each “hedgehog” and each “flamingo” through a careful consideration of constantly fluctuating goals might be a much-needed shift to co-creation in Russian health communication.

In this chapter we discuss the messy meaning-making strategies (and their interactions) which characterize Russian health communication today. We open our discussion by situating the game field that produces the meaning of health in contemporary Russia. In this opening, we introduce the key health communicators (pharmaceuticals, governmental or regulatory actors, the institutional medical sector, health professionals, and patient NGOs and communities) and how they share the field. We then introduce the Russian national strategy of patient-oriented health protection and the contradictory meanings that each sector of communicators attaches to it. We elaborate on the mismatch in communication of patient-oriented health protection, discussing successes and failures of health communication practices in different sectors. We analyze how the government, activists, institutions, business, and medical professionals communicate their meanings, the place of other communicators in campaign planning and execution, and how flexible and interactive the practices of each communicator sector are. We conclude with propositions on how the road towards patient-oriented health protection can be built in Russia.

The main focus of the research is concentrated on the analysis of the teaching practices of the discipline “Intercultural Communication” and the methods of contextual learning. The main idea of the classes using the method of contextual learning is related to immersion of students through performance and visualization in the context of the studied micro and macro cultures. The purpose of in-class sessions with the use of the mentioned techniques is to give students the opportunity to practice the theoretical material and improve the skills of intercultural communication.

The main goal of this research is to identify specific sociolinguistic patterns in Russian professional crisis communication discourse. This chapter addresses hybridity of Russian crisis communication professional rhetoric, primarily focusing on a combination of two types of discourses: black public relations defense and crisis communication. The study contains a qualitative pilot analysis of nonacademic expert texts on crisis communication. Critical discourse analysis applied to professional discourse provides insight into culture-related specifics of this field in Russia. The research is followed by two case descriptions of organizational crises to illustrate possible interference of black public relations defense discourse into crisis communication practice in Russia. The results provide practical implications for cross-cultural communication with Russian public relations professionals and set direction for future research in this field.

The emergence of social media in the 2000s has transformed Russian information dissemination and social relations. Brisk Internet penetration has set new platforms for civic and political discussions and has provided additional channels for brand promotion. A growing body of research is devoted to both consequences. This chapter outlines strengths and challenges of extant social media research, identifying key themes and problem issues in given areas. In the beginning, we provide a brief historical overview of existing social media platforms, communication patterns, and users practices on social media. In the second section, we compare research agendas and current findings in applied social media inquiries and summarize social media’s effect on politics, business, and society. In conclusion, we set an agenda for further research, focusing particularly on the growing role of social media in contentious politics in Russia.

Social media and Russia society

This work outlines the problem of communication overload and considers techniques to overcome it. The work is based on such concepts as “communication overload,” “Internet detox,” and “overcoming techniques.” The work examines the types of techniques (communication, technical, intermittent use of social networks), behavioral patterns of users both in relation to their use by themselves and in the manifested reactions to the use of techniques by others. The general method is a literature review, the empirical part is based on in-depth interviews to identify the need for the use of such techniques and possible additional ways to overcome communication overload.

The development of communication as academic knowledge and practical activity must be based on the accumulation of social capital and the existence of democratic processes in a society. This chapter describes how the institutionalization of the public sphere has been coming about after political and economic reform in Russia had begun. The reorientation of communication knowledge from language-centered to sociology- and psychology-centered has provided the basis of the professionalization of communication as a practical activity. Especially public relations and its strategic dimension being constrained to build and to manage multi-stakeholder relationships appears to be most sensitive communication tool in the quality of the institutionalized public sphere. The more that civil society will have an opportunity to influence the formation of a political and economic agenda, the more strategic communications will become a platform for relationships among the state, market, and the public in Russia.

History of Communication as a field and discipline in Russia is often viewed as the development of different communications domains. This chapter considers the evolution of public relations education as one of the branches of communication in post-Soviet Russia. The chapter raises the question how the legacy of the Soviet Union and the inclusion of Russia in the global context shape the current state of public relations industry and education. Due to Soviet ideological patterns and the country’s social-cultural and economical evolution, institutionalization of post-Soviet public relations seems to support the logic of “path dependence”. The history of Russian public relations education and research is predominantly driven by the influence of the United States and some European countries. Greater convergence with the latter being partly determined by the similarity in the value systems of these countries and the fact that Russia has been a country-participant of the Bologna Process. Therefore, both historical legacy and global context have had an impact on institutionalization of public relations as an academic field in post-Soviet Russia. Today, the identity of Russian public relations school is most clearly manifested in the establishment of an integrated degree program combining Advertising and Public Relations. The Russian degree’s eclectic nature, public relations industry needs, and historical context are a promising foundation for development of Integrated Communications.

Gamification becomes an important and widely used instrument in online learning, and it affects users' experience. However, recent research on the interaction between a user and technology, in the online learning platform, tends to study gamification separately. This paper aims to overcome the research gap, exploring the relationships between user engagement, platform affordances, and gamification in online learning. An online survey was conducted among the participants (N=375) studying with Skyeng (commercial online platform for learning English). The data was analysed with factor and regression analysis. The results demonstrated four major platform affordances: technology credibility and usability, adaptability of course tasks, phasing and intermittence and external reward. Among the four, technology credibility and usability was found to be the most influential predictor of user engagement in online learning. External reward, as an affordance, drawn from gamification elements, has the smallest contribution to user engagement. However, the study proves the suitability of perceiving gamified elements as affordances by platform users. The research provides conceptual and empirical grounds for studying gamification elements as one of the affordances in online learning and outlines further directions to explore these connections.

This article is devoted to the evolution of modern technologies of color revolutions and the peculiarities of their hybridization (on the example of Venezuela and Belarus). The authors note that modern color revolutions are a combined (hybrid) technology that combines the classic Maidan, worked out during the fi rst and second color revolutions in Ukraine (in 2004–05 and 2013–14); the latest technologies of confl ict mobilization (for an initially non-political agenda), developed during several “electromayans” in Armenia; technologies of communication and coordination of the activity of protest groups, taken from the organizers of mass protests in Hong Kong (2019–20); and technologies of organizing a coup d'état that almost put an end to the existence of the Chavist regime in Venezuela in 2019.

The year 2020 and the drastic increase of demand for digitalized informational technologies demonstrated that behind every positive aspect of development of contemporary information society we can find also negative aspects.

The research is devoted to a wide range of problems of culture, art, architecture, cinema, design and political representation of modernism, postmodernism and metamodernism, considered as actual realities of modernity. The mosaic and collision of these "attractions" becomes a space for analyzing and modeling the new cultural situation of the XXI century.

The contemporary world is characterized with slowdown of key processes of global institutional development at the background of instrumental capabilities for geo-economic competition that could now include the methods of political and economic pressure upon competitors. Such a state of affairs could be called «a pre-chaos» that means the backpedaling major developments in the global geoeconomics (including the investment ones) as well as the political one while waiting for the massive turbulence that could include application of force. The USA are interested in maximum prolongation of the pre-chaos state in order to buy time to consolidate the elite and stabilize the society socially. But the prolonged existence of world economy within the frame of pre-chaos model that among other things results in avoiding the longer-term economic decisions including investment-related ones, only increases the destructive potential of future crisis with the destruction of the vital elements of the system of global economic interdependence

Th e paper examines the eff ect of global transformations exacerbated by situational factors, in particular, the political instability in the United States and the coronavirus pandemic, on the changes in the system of military-political challenges to Russia’s security and development. It substantiates the need to revise the approaches to the implementation of national security strategy, offering the priorities in its provision that are topical for present-day conditions.

Versions of the folktale Zêrka Zêra (in Kurdish)/Stērka Zerá (in Ṭuroyo) circulate throughout southeastern Anatolia. The story belongs to a widely-disseminated tale type, the ‘Bear’s Wife’, which concerns a young woman who is abducted by a bear (or other wilderness creature) and is forced to spawn and rear his children before escaping or being rescued. The following Ṭuroyo version was recorded during the 2018 winter field season of the Russian expedition to Ṭur Abdin in the village of Ḥaḥ/Anıtlı from a speaker of the dialect of Bequsyone. It represents the first scholarly publication not only of the Ṭuroyo version, but of any version of this folktale. In addition to the folktale and a translation, the study includes a glossary of the vocabulary used within the text, reflecting some Ṭuroyo words that have not been documented elsewhere. The paper also discusses the motifs of the Stērka Zerá folktale according to the standard classification scheme of folk motifs.

The present text may be compared with the audio recording available at https://iocs.hse.ru/en/sterkazera.

An innovative development based on the use of modern media and communication technologies requires a certain level of competence in how to use such technologies. These competencies are united by the concept of “information literacy”, proposed by Paul Gilster in 1997. The tradition of studying digital literacy in Russia is the subject of the following chapter. The different approaches to understanding digital literacy are as follows: ICT, psychological and pedagogical, media and information and industrial approaches.

Special attention is paid to the four-component digital literacy model, proposed in the framework of the project by ROCIT and the Higher School of Economics. This model is based on two substantial oppositions: firstly, the opposition “technical-technological/socio-humanitarian” and, secondly, the opposition “opportunities/threats”. It was used to construct the Index of Digital Literacy in the Russian Regions, measured since 2015.

The results of a series of media literacy measuring surveys by the ZIRCON Group from 2009–2016 are also presented.

The research is focused on the problem of the ambiguity in the perception of Russia in the British media during the 2018 FIFA World Cup and based on the competing frames theory by J. Druckman. The content analysis of 751 articles about Russia from the British broadsheets and tabloids was conducted to highlight five frames: ‘Russia as the enemy of Great Britain,’ ‘Russia as the potential partner of Great Britain,’ ‘Russia as the unsafe state,’ ‘Russia as the worthy host of the World Cup,’ ‘Russia as a country with a rich culture.’ The results show that negative perception of Russia prevails in the British media field, especially in the broadsheets. Despite the slight positive dynamics during the World Cup, by the end of the games, the frequency of frames returns to pre-championship values. The research contributes to the development of competing frames theory and allows testing the frame strength criteria.

The lack of academic integrity combined with the prevalence of fraud and other forms of unethical behavior are problems that higher education faces in both developing and developed countries, at mass and elite universities, and at public and private institutions. While academic misconduct is not new, massification, internationalization, privatization, digitalization, and commercialization have placed ethical challenges higher on the agenda for many universities. Corruption in academia is particularly unfortunate, not only because the high social regard that universities have traditionally enjoyed, but also because students—young people in critical formative years—spend a significant amount of time in universities. How they experience corruption while enrolled might influence their later personal and professional behavior, the future of their country, and much more. Further, the corruption of the research enterprise is especially serious for the future of science. The contributors to Corruption in Higher Education: Global Challenges and Responses bring a range of perspectives to this critical topic.