Publications

The article is devoted to the analysis of the problems that arise in the system of social networks in connection with the intensification of the struggle of law enforcement bodies of the Russian Federation with phenomena that are referred to in the legal field as “extremism”, “incitement to hatred” and “insulting the feelings of believers”. The goal of the project is to analyze the problems of regulating social networks and author’s content in the context of world and domestic experience in the struggle for “network neutrality”. An interdisciplinary analysis was used in the work. In the modern Russian media space, the role of an expert and expertise on which the assessment of the content of social networks depends. The analysis performed in the article indicates that the traditional methods of examining web texts need substantial updating. The question was also raised about the need to clearly describe the qualifications of an expert and to regulate the selection of experts and the boundaries of their functional activities. Keyword: Network Сontent; Net Neutrality; Psycholinguistic Expertise.

This chapter presents the case of Russell Brand in order to look at how the most fundamental antinomies of the type of celebrity activism put in tension some prevalent theoretical frameworks around the field. In November 2013, Brand gave an interview to the journalist Jeremy Paxman for the BBC show Newsnight where he advocated, among other things, a ‘revolution’ and a ‘massive redistribution of wealth’. The chapter explores how the devotion to the revolutionary cause was embodied in the ethos of anarchist and Marxist revolutionaries of the past. Brand’s identity both as a superstar of creative Britain and a revolutionary agent of anti-austerity movements displays the in-built conflicts, tensions, and discrepancies that the figure of the activist celebrity embodies. The tensions that the activist celebrity enables may renegotiate dominant regimes of understanding by offering visibility to new vocabularies around social concerns without necessarily being perceived as a reaction against available electoral politics.

 

This chapter  analyses the evolution of the relationship between centralized control over local media media systems and local interests at the regional level in Russia. It demonstrates that during the post-soviet period the soviet hierarchical control was reproduced as a result of the dominance of the so called “central media” over the regional media. As the political balance between federal and regional powers evolved,  so did the model of media control. From this point of view the local policy during Yeltsin’s period was shaped by the shift of power from the centre, allowing the regions to develop high levels of autonomy.  This  transformed local media into powerful agents of local politics and contributed to the high pressure on local media from different political and elite groups. Such pressures paradoxically formed more pluralist model of the press. After 2000 the power of local media was weakened, which dissociated retired local media from elite group political processes and contributed to the monopolization of local media by local authorities especially on the basis of commercial contracts between such authorities and the press. Such contracts shape considerably the control of local media by the local authorities paying media for loyal coverage of their policies.  

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 paper addresses the questions of data science education of current importance. It aims to introduce and justify the framework that allows flexibly evaluate the processes of a data expedition and a digital media created during it. For these purposes, the authors explore features of digital media artefacts which are specific to data expeditions and are essential to accurate evaluation. The rubrics as a power but hardly formalizable evaluation method in application to digital media artefacts are also discussed. Moreover, the paper documents the experience of rubrics creation according to the suggested framework. The rubrics were successfully adopted to two data-driven journalism courses. The authors also formulate recommendations on data expedition evaluation which should take into consideration structural features of a data expedition, distinctive features of digital media, etc.

This study proposes the interventionist and the detached orientations to watchdog journalism through the conceptual lens of journalistic role performance. Based on a content analysis of 33,640 news stories from sixty-four media outlets in eighteen countries, we measure and compare both orientations across different countries using three performative aspects of monitoring: intensity of scrutiny, voice of the scrutiny, and source of the event. Our findings show that the interventionist approach of watchdog journalism is more likely to be found in democracies with traditionally partisan and opinion-oriented journalistic cultures or experiencing sociopolitical crises. In turn, the detached orientation predominates in democracies with journalistic traditions associated to objectivity. Although both orientations have a lower presence in transitional democracies, the detached watchdog prevails, while in non-democratic countries the watchdog role is almost absent. Our results also reveal that structural contexts of undemocratic political regimes and restricted press freedom are key definers of watchdog role performance overall. However, the type of political regime is actually more important—and in fact the most important predictor—for detached than for interventionist reporting.

Cultural diplomacy has traditionally been a strategic instrument of national governments to achieve foreign policy objectives. Nation states have supported the international missions of museums to promote national cultural ideas and values abroad to pursue strategic geopolitical interests. However, in the twenty-first century the complex process of neoliberal globalisation and political decentralisation have transformed traditional cultural diplomacy based on exclusively national projections. There are new forms, channels and narratives of cultural diplomacy that emerge with the appearance of new types of cultural institutions, such as franchise museums, like Guggenheim Bilbao, Hermitage Amsterdam or Louvre Abu Dhabi. This article explores the case of Louvre Abu Dhabi to exemplify the phenomenon of ‘glocal’ museum diplomacy that rests on global ambitions of the local Abu Dhabi government and at the same time draws on national aspirations of France to strengthen its geopolitical presence and influence in the Middle East. The article identifies multiple museum narratives that transform museum diplomacy from a bilateral, state-initiated strategic activity into a multilateral and multidirectional endeavour engaging stakeholders and audiences on local, national and global levels.

This article examines how disability and sexuality are represented in today’s Russian media, and how disabled people navigate these understandings. Drawing on online storytelling and frst person stories about sexuality told by disabled people in the public sphere, the article provides a qualitative account of people with disabilities, journalists and civil rights advocates, analyzing how contemporary Russians with disabilities narrate their own lives in public forums. The focus of their stories, as well as the accounts of eyewitnesses, volunteers in the institutions, is on the constraints and limits of sexuality and intimacy spheres imposed by the professionals, families and wider society. This article also interprets the narratives behind disabled people’s sexuality circulating in contemporary Russia through digital networks, in combination with qualitative data from primary sources: disability activists and two journalists with and without disability in Moscow. It is argued that the telling of these stories in a public forum is a political act. In personal stories about sexual, bodily experiences told in the interviews or autobiographical texts, self-presentations and discussions in social networks, the voices of people are heard, permitting emancipation from previous categories. However, disability always remains with them, playing an important role in social lives of these people and in their sexual experiences and identities, becoming the cornerstone of the personal and collective re-defning of themselves. Using ideas of “visibility politics” (Arendt), queer/crip kinship and intimate citizenship (Plummer), the authors demonstrate how someone might choose to speak publicly about a topic and how this understanding develops cultural understandings of contemporary Russia.

25 years after the first publication of Media Events: The Live Broadcasting of History (Dayan and Katz 1992), not only has the concept of media events firmly taken root in media theory, but it has also been developed considerably as a result of multiple critical interpretations. Going beyond a neo-Durkheimian ritual perspective, which emphasized the integrative role of ceremonial media events, has allowed a number of authors to identify such genres as ‘disruptive’, ‘traumatic’ or ‘conflictual’ media events, including, first and foremost, terror, disaster and war (Cottle 2006; Dayan 2008; Hepp and Couldry 2010; Katz and Liebes 2007; Mitu and Poulakidakos 2016). However, there is another type of events targeting social and cultural change, which do not exactly fit the ‘integrative/disruptive’ opposition, even if these events take the form of protest, for ‘protests and strikes are agreed forms of sanctioned disruption’ (Katz and Liebes 2007: 159). Until protest grows into a revolution and civil war, it is an instance of ‘ritual’ chaos, constituting a part of the order. Events of this type show some features of social drama and cultural performance (Turner 1974, 1982; Alexander 2006, 2011). Nevertheless, not every ‘transformative media event’ (Mihelj 2008) has such radical goals and sweeping scale.

‘Transformative media events’ are initiated in public spaces by citizens, whose disagreement with certain social conditions and/or a call for change they express. The transformative power can be an inherent element of the event (for instance, in the case of a protest action), or can emerge as a result of public response to a published opinion or document (such as a YouTube video recording police abuse). The latter case includes practices of ‘sousveillance’ (Mann et al. 2003) or ‘citizen witnessing’ (Allan 2013) directed at the democratization of social relations. A key feature of ‘transformative media events’ is their tight connection to the ‘citizen media’, by means of which they become visible and powerful. In this context it seems useful to consider media events as ‘user-generated media events’ (Mitu 2016), ‘new media events’ (Neverson and Adeyanju 2017), ‘transmedia events’ (Bacallao-Pino 2016), etc.

The article discusses the mechanisms of constructing leaders of public opinion in a modern neo-information society. A set of methods has been applied: the authors’ study using the focus group method ‘Bloggers=influencers?’ (n=10); the secondary analysis of ZIRCON research group sociological study by the personal interview ‘The image of a journalist in the mass consciousness of Russians’ (n=1604); frame analysis of the construction of hype as a social phenomenon in the media discourse; authors’ research using the case study method ‘Phenomenon of Diana Shurygina." The chronological scope of the study: 2017-2019. It is concluded that the strengthening of the actors of the blogging institution in the media became possible as a result of a ‘crisis of confidence’ to the ‘traditional’ media, in particular to television, with a politicized media agenda leading to the acquisition of a propaganda vector, thereby determining the trend of media piarisation. Being the influencers (mainly for the young generation who are exceptionally loyal), bloggers affect the construction of the system of norms, values, and attitudes of their audience. At the same time, the functioning of bloggers as leaders of public opinion promotes to the inspiration of marketing strategies: the sales of different goods and services through native advertising and product placement, the so-called influencer marketing. Besides, by constructing such social phenomena as hype, bloggers become drivers of hypononomics (or the economy of hype).

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.

This article is devoted to the analysis of the politics of the past in Russian cinema. This research is conducted within the scientific field of public history, this approach sheds light on the existence of a compromise in the reconstruction of the past between the authorities and society. One identifiable trend was toward the transformation of classic historical drama into the heroic past: comic-style blockbusters about the super heroic past have been created.

Russian television has a common problem: the most active media consumers are abandoning television to binge-watch foreign TV shows on online streaming services or social networks with video content. Transmedia storytelling (TS) could re-invent old-fashioned media by using multiple media platforms, content expansion and audience engagement to add active media consumers to a decreasing television audience.

But will TS really help Russian TV re-invent itself and its audience or will it simply disguise the gap between the different interests of TV audiences and producers? This chapter first gives an overview of recent developments in Russian television, its audience and transmedia storytelling. It then studies the transmedia project “Sasha Sokolov. The Last Russian Writer”, produced by Russia’s leading broadcaster Channel One Russia, using methodology based on Gambarato’s (2013) transmedia analytical model. 

The documentary’s subject is a little-known, cult author; it is produced as a detective docudrama and promoted by transmedia strategies, which contributed to its remarkable success, even in an unpopular category. However, the closed character of Russian television and the producers’ choice to limit the participatory opportunities of TS diminished the possibly greater success of the program. This case demonstrates the problems of freedom of expression on Russian TV, which is limited to “safe” topics (such as literature) and allows alternative (and not always argumentative) opinions only from the members of an elite group. Contemporary media technologies and strategies are used to expand the number of viewers, but not to initiate public discussion.

The book by art historian Sergey Kavtaradze aims at explaining to the reader as simply as possible what architecture is as an art. The author reveals how the mechanisms of perception of an architectural structure work and why one enjoys it aesthetically. By popularizing the history of European styles and the logic of their development the book teaches how to see and analyze on your own the plastic qualities of architectural form and countless layers of meanings the architect intended to convey.
The book addresses a wide audience interested in architecture and the history of art.

The research is devoted to the critical analysis, modeling and rethinking of tasks and functions of design, object and subject of design activity at a new stage of development of social, economic and technological systems. Design is considered in the context of fundamental problems of social relations and social forms of the future. The paper raises the problems of post-capitalism, metamodernism, post-truth, precariat, technological displacement, etc. as an actual component of modern design theory.

The article proposes a concept according to which an anthropological understanding of the text is possible. This concept is based on the ideas of the authors of ancient texts, German romantics, Russian philosophers. In the framework of the proposed concept, the text is considered as a medium between the external and internal worlds of man. The external world is understood as an impersonal reality, used as a resource for human development. It is emphasized that this world is external only for a specific individual. For humanity as a whole, this world is a product of human activity; it has only the appearance of objectivity, quasi-objectivity, imaginary empirical factuality and objectivity. The internal world of a person consists of images and ideas that are grouped into identity, incentive sphere, regulatory and semantic sphere, executive sphere. Acting as a medium between the external and internal worlds, a specific text is a fragment of the information and communication universum, the main feature of which is duality. On the one hand, it exists in conscious and unconscious forms of activity of living beings, including humans. On the other hand, it does not depend on anyone, and even determines the communicative behavior of all creatures known to us (viruses, bacteria, plants, animals, humans). In other words, a man is a resource of his reproduction and self-development in relation to the information and communication universum. In a situation of rapid development of information resources and communication technologies, the question of whether modern science can comprehend the information and communication universum in all its multidimensionality and complexity, and take control of its ability to influence people, becomes an urgent issue. Moreover, this issue is becoming important not only for the humanities, but also for the future of humanity.

The term cult is frequently used in everyday language, mostly when referring to cinema, but not always accordingly to its true meaning. However, defining the “correct” meaning of “cult cinema” is quite a challenging task and it is very hard to provide a univocal answer to what cult cinema really is. In this book the author attempts to understand what cult cinema is: when and how it originated, how it has been developing, what it was, what it has become and whether it has survived at all. And if it has survived, how should we speak about it today?
The book comprises two unequal parts. In the first part — a theoretical and methodological introduction — the author offers his view on how it is possible to reflect on cult cinema today. In the second part the factual material is presented — one hundred and twenty three essays on cult films given in chronological order so that the reader could get an idea about the evolution of the phenomenon.
The book is intended not only for specialists in cultural and social studies but also for all who enjoy cinema and especially those who appreciate non-standard cinema.

The training manual includes lecture material, practical training plans and guidelines for their implementation, topics of reports and essays, lists of recommended literature for each topic, a glossary and questions for preparing for intermediate certification, which allows you to create a holistic view of such a relatively new scientific and academic discipline, as the sociology of media culture and media education.

It complies with the current requirements of the Federal State Educational Standard of Higher Education. For university teachers and undergraduates, the direction of training is “Pedagogical Education”, the profile is “Media Education” (and related areas).

The chapter is focuses on the research in rural Russia. The empirical materials were studied in the historical context. The chapter helps to understand the consequences of the Russion Revolution 1917.

Historically, Russian art and design education has always been closest to the fine arts. It was a system that trained masters of visual, decorative, applied, and industrial arts as well as architects, teachers of fine arts, and fine arts historians. Official opinion on art education in Russia, as expressed by the consensus of the professionals in defining it as a phenomenon, is reflected in a number of encyclopedias. Various encyclopedias – by publishing houses such as Brockhaus, Efron, and Granat – have been published in Russia during different historical periods, including the “big” and “small” Soviet encyclopedias. In modern Russia, a project called the Big Soviet Encyclopedia has been launched, but because of a lack of time it has not yet been fully developed. The account in this chapter is based on the account of art history in Russia offered by the Big Soviet Encyclopedia and in other works that contain historical data about the development of educational institutions during these periods. Art education has been closely linked with the transformation of Russian artistic culture. The structure and contents of today’s art education emerged over a number of historical periods, each of which made a unique contribution based on its cultural context.