Publications

How do journalists make news in Russian newspapers and what journalistic roles emerge from news content? We conducted a study of the news content of two general interest newspapers: Rossiiskaia Gazeta (RG), official organ of the Russian government, and Moskovskii Komsomolets (MK), a private newspaper oriented to a mass readership. Despite their different orientations and ownership, both newspapers relied mostly on government/party sources and prioritized the voices of the authorities and of the journalist—typical characteristics of a Soviet newspaper.

How do nonprofit organizations (NPOs) engage in advocacy in closed political regimes? This article studies nonprofit advocacy in Russia by focusing on strategies and explanatory factors. We argue that Russian NPOs rely on collaborative rather than confrontational strategies. They use official channels, personal contact with state officials, strategies for resource exchange and evidence-based advocacy. Based on empirical research in eight regions, we show that nonprofit advocacy depends on both external (contextual) and internal (organizational) factors. NPOs have greater opportunity to engage in advocacy when the subnational institutional context and the policy field allow for their active participation in policy formation and implementation. Moreover, NPOs are more successful in their advocacy when they strategically use their capabilities (e.g., knowledge, expertise and skills) and emphasize mutual trust, loyalty and readiness to compromise. Our findings point to the relevance of collaborative forms of advocacy, particularly in constrained political environments such as Russia.

The research is dedicated to the modern Korean architect Moon Hoon. Moon's work, combining various elements of modernism, brutalism, postmodernism and parametricism, is considered within the framework of a new large historical and conceptual narrative — metamodernism. The categories of analysis necessary for attributing Moon's architecture were some significant theoretical provisions of metamodernism and their development. The projects of Moon Hoon and other contemporary Korean architects are analyzed in a broad architectural and cultural context.

The transformations of modern global world proceed asymmetrically in different spheres of human activity. With the of preservation of current global trends, the sphere of socio-cultural relations will demonstrate advanced development with creation of the new formats not only for social but rather for socio-economic inter- action. This trend is emphasized by the increase in the importance of the infor- mation society as the integrating element of different aspects of the globalization and simultaneously by the stagnation of the socio-economic basis of global devel- opment. But under some conditions a complicated situation could emerge when the formats rather than economic factors can start to form models of social behavior at least for major socially involved groups. Such situations could emerge for rather short in historical perspective period. But its importance is underlined by the depth of potential transformations that give the opportunity not only to alter the manifes- tations of the in-depth of the basic trends but also the systemic links the form the basis those trends. But within the framework of such trends the importance of the formats for implementation of the new models of socio-cultural interaction would increase as well as the spaces that will be relevant for practical adaptation of such models. That will lead us to the “special” world much different from the world of the mature globalization.

Nonprofit organizations are playing an increasingly important role in the modern world and becoming the object of many studies. Much of them are comparative works that explain both national and regional differences in the size of the nonprofit sector. Studies of the Russian nonprofit sector have repeatedly pointed to regional differences. However, the scale and factors of these differences have not been studied before and have not been explained by all the theoretical background accumulated in this area. Using Rosstat data for 2018, we tested the four most common groups of theories explaining regional differences in the size of the nonprofit sector in terms of the number of organizations, their labor, and financial resources. The tested theories include welfare theory, state failure theory, interdependence theory, and social capital theory. The study results show that the amount of state support and, to a somewhat lesser extent, social capital has a more significant influence on the size of the nonprofit sector in Russian regions. These data can speak of the extremely high importance of government funding for the size of the NPO sector in Russia and its regions and its dependence on budget revenues

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.

Are investors in electoral authoritarian regimes discriminated against for political activism? In this paper, we implement a simple experiment to test whether affiliation with the ruling party or the political opposition affects the probability that investors receive advice from investment promotion agencies in Russian regions. Between December 2016 and June 2017, we sent 1504 emails with a short question and a number of randomized treatments to 188 investment promotion agencies in 70 Russian regions. Although investment promotion agencies are nominally depoliticized in Russia, we find that switching the political affiliation of a potential investor from the opposition party “Yabloko” to the government party “United Russia” on average increases the chances to receive a reply by 30%. The effect strongly depends on regional levels of political competition, with higher levels of discrimination in regions that are less politically competitive.

Student evaluations of teaching (SET) are one of the most common and important practices of education quality assessment. Their origins are in paper-based surveys conducted at the end of each study module in many American universities from the middle of 20th century. Students wrote key positive and negative characteristics of a particular teacher and course and gave them a numerical rating. The forms were then used for university management decisions. Nowadays SET has transformed with its spread to universities all over the world and a shift online.

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 world of late globalization is distinguished by duality and internal contradictions in socio- cultural relations and communications, which reflects in the crisis of universal models of social behavior. The only area where the principles of social universality remain relevant is the sphere of communications, where active development of new formats and the emergence of new cultural proto-artifacts continues. The coronavirus pandemic has altered the logic of development in this segment of global interaction, since it affected the very foundations of universal social behavior models. Socio-cultural relations, due to a complex of reasons, are becoming a sphere where tendencies interact and compete as well as institutions associated with the period of late globalization, including those that emerged on the wave of its crisis. At the same time, the communication environment becomes extremely important, since new technologies will make it possible to reflect not only macro-trends, but also the evolution of micro-cultures, which, in the context of a systemic (institutional) crisis of globalization, are becoming more important than usual. This symbiotic socio-cultural- communication phenomenon can become one of the most important factors in determining future models of global development. The article analyzes the most important directions of development of the sphere of socio-cultural communications and their transformation in 2020-2021. The article amplifies whether the trends for socio-cultural developments that formed through the pandemic crisis lead towards the formation of a new model of socio-cultural development or such trends remain within the traditional framework. The major conclusion is that the formation of the model has not started yet, though the risk of distraction of global socio-cultural – and probably social universality – became obvious. Conclusions are made regarding further transformation of the sphere of socio-cultural development in the current information environment

Researchers see self-regulated learning (SRL) as a fundamental skill for succeeding in massive open online courses (MOOCs). However, there is no sufficient evidence of adequate functioning of SRL dimensions such as environment structuring, goal setting, time management, help-seeking, task strategies, and self-evaluation in the MOOC environment. This study fills the gap in understanding the structure of SRL skills utilising the Online Self-Regulated Learning Questionnaire (OSLQ). The construct-related validity of the OSLQ is evaluated based on self-reported survey responses of 913 Russian MOOC learners with confirmatory factor analysis and criterion-related validity is checked with independent samples t-tests comparison. The results show that the original six-factor hierarchical model does not fit the data adequately. The evidence implies that the dimension ‘help-seeking’ is not effective in the MOOC environment. Therefore, a redefined five-factor hierarchical model of the OSLQ is suggested.

This article is intended to update the topic of digital celebrity in the Russian scientific research field. The key task is to describe the evolution of the conceptual mindmap of the main theoretical directions - from the classical theories of R. Merton, P. Lazarsfeld to modern authors N. Couldry, J. Alexander, D. Marshall, K. Abidin. A special focus is the analysis of a new type of celebrity digital platforms, the selection and systematization of key concepts and theoretical frames for their analysis.

As a result, a matrix for analyzing digital celebrities will be presented, describing their personal brand and career. The authors also proposed conceptual dichotomies to describe the nature of digital celebrities’ fame, the basis of their media capital.

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 impact of digitalization on higher education, strategies for using online tools in teaching and methods of effective communication in an electronic environment are topics that have been studied for at least two decades [1]. Interest in them arose long before the COVID-19 pandemic and the forced total transition to distance learning. During this period, the methodological arsenal of researchers and teachers has accumulated many materials on how to effectively teach students in digital environments. But only in the spring of 2020, did digital education become a reality for all teachers. It was during this period that a radical change took place in understanding the role of digital technologies in learning and the approaches to working with them. This provided the most ambitious practical test of the techniques and theories that had been developed. As a result, some of them have proven their viability and effectiveness, and others have not and should be discarded. The principle of "learning by doing" has never been so relevant. However, this is where an important question arises: Who can be a mentor and reliable guide for university teachers in the digital world?

The paper studies the expression of tense and voice in an Akkadian variety, Neo-Assyrian. The grammatical reading of a given verb form results from the interaction of the lexical meaning of the verb in question with the grammatical semantics of the morphological form used. Starting from this observation, the authors single out five verbal classes of Neo-Assyrian, related to the values of dynamicity and transitivity.