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.

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.

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.

Transition to distance learning during the COVID‑19 lockdown in spring 2020 was a challenge to the education system in general and higher education in particular. Applied Sciences were unanimously recognized as the most affected due to their focuson practical skills, being closely tied to the institutional infrastructure, and a moderate curriculum digitalization. This article describes student experiences during the spring semester of academic year 2019/20, using data obtained from 30 interviews with students in Engineering, Technology & Applied Sciences, Health & Medical Sciences, and Arts & Culture degrees. Delivery of lectures and practical classes, placements, dissertations, and faculty–student interactions are analyzed. Findings are consistent with the widely discussed perception of education during the pandemic not as distance learning but rather as emergency remote teaching that requires supportive measures to compensate for time loss in learning as well as solutions to technical and methodological issues.

Nisane Ergün was born in 1933 in Beqŭsyone (Turk. Alagöz). She is a native and fluent speaker of Ṭuroyo, a contemporary form of Eastern Aramaic. Although never formally educated, she is a gifted storyteller. Throughout her entire life, she has been engaged in subsistence farming and animal husbandry, in much the same manner as her Kurdish neighbours and other rural populations throughout northern Mesopotamia. Her life story, here related in her own words, is thus an exercise in narrating history ‘from below’. She is an eyewitness to various dramatic periods in the recent history of Ṭur Abdin.

Some researchers have questioned the use of dropout metrics to assess the quality of MOOCs. The main reason for this doubt is that participants register for online courses with different intentions. Therefore, it is proposed to use a learner-centred approach and to study the learner intention-fulfilment. Researchers studied the effect of result-oriented intention on MOOC completion. However, studies in traditional educational settings have shown that a more significant predictor of behavior is not result-oriented intention, but action-oriented intention. In our paper, we expand the study of the intention-to-behavior relation in MOOCs and identify the role of strong positive action-oriented intentions in MOOCs. As strong positive action-oriented intentions, we identified two types of intention: intention to watch all the video lectures and intention to complete all the tasks. The research database consists of trace data and survey data collected among participants of 5 MOOCs launched in the spring semester of 2017. Survey data recorded one result-oriented intention (to earn a certificate) and the two strong positive action-oriented intentions. The results showed, first, a significant relationship between strong positive action-oriented intentions and behavior in MOOCs. Secondly, we found that the intention to watch lectures and to complete tasks are conceptually different intentions: the intention to watch lectures does not play a significant role in course completion compared to the intention to complete all the tasks. Thirdly, we found that the strong positive action-oriented intention to complete all the tasks is a more powerful predictor of course completion than the result-oriented intention. These results can be used to adjust interventions that are embedded in the courses to increase their effectiveness.

This paper investigates the paradox of research productivity of higher-education institutions in the Arab Gulf Countries. Exploring the case of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) the article fills the gap in the literature on the Gulf higher education research efficiency. Despite the considerable investment into higher education, UAE universities showed rather slow growth in research output. This puzzle was tackled to present possible policy outcomes relevant for research productivity in higher education institutions located in the emerging economies. The study highlights the research productivity indicators dynamics for GCC countries and brings detailed analysis on the research output and input for the UAE universities. We argue that to succeed in academic efficiency the county needs to increase its research investments and diversify research-boosting policies and practices. The policies should focus on work-attractive long-term conditions for the faculty/researchers, home-based doctoral education system and home-trained human resources.

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

The current article investigates societal indicators associated with economic development that may account for the strong positive correlation between GDP per capita and protest intensity. The authors’ tests reveal that the expansion of democratization, education, and urbanization are one of the main influences accounting for this positive relationship between GDP per capita growth and anti-government protest intensity. Moreover, when controlling for these factors, the relationship between GDP per capita and anti-state protests becomes negative indicating that the forces associated with economic development at a certain point play a larger role than economic growth itself. The results of this study, thus, have implications for both Resource Mobilization and Cultural Theorists due to the fact that further GDP per capita growth becomes an inhibitor of protests in the high-income countries instead of a promoter.

The  article  is  devoted  to  the  specifics of  online  communication  in  TV  shows’fandoms.  Based  on  symbolic  convergence  theory  and  the  emerging  concept  of online   creative   collaboration,   this   study   focuses   on several   communicationalprocesses in fandoms, such as causal factors of   intergroup and intragroup conflicts,motivation  to  interact  and  co-create  with  fandom  peers  and  sources  of  hierarchyinside  fandoms.  Qualitative  research,  including nine semi-structured interviews  withfandom  members  from  different countries  and  a  netnographic  study  of  Twitterfandoms,   offers   in-depth   insights   into   communication   in   TV   shows’   fandoms.International  youth  fan  communities  in  social media  are  of  scientific  interest  as a cultural  and  communication phenomenon.  As  fans  become  more  influential,  theresults also have practical implications for the promotion of TV shows.

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.