Publications

For the purposes of the present chapter, morphosyntax is an inquiry into the meanings of inflectional verb forms. Another, more transparent, label for this field of study is grammatical (i.e., morphological) semantics. In this overview, we deal only with the verbal morphosyntax.

Our overview embraces four Akkadian idioms: Sargonic and three Babylonian varieties: OB, MB, NB. Their descriptions are corpus-based, which means we have parsed a certain corpus as a witness for each of the varieties. The data resulting from our parsing constitute the factual ground and justification of the claims made in our description.

Our overview is divided thematically into four parts: Tense, Voice (Passivization), Verbal Plurality, Modality. Within each part, we produce a morphosyntactic description for each of the four Akkadian varieties, because each of the four amounts to us to a language in its own right.

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.

This chapter explores the practice of crowdsourcing in global governance as a tool of multilateral diplomacy to interrogate its exact role and place in decision-making processes. It focuses on media discourse analysis of the public debates concerning the new definition, focusing mostly on the international Anglophone media and on the blog posts written by museum professionals. Conducive to cultural diplomacy stewardship and the cooperative engagement of the professional museum community, International Commission of Museums (ICOM) strives to tackle cultural engagement challenges and promotes “creativity, innovation, and systematization in this field of inquiry and practice”. The museum definition has traditionally been a part of the ICOM statutes and its revision “is a formally regulated process. The crowdsourcing exercise proved that online participants were highly motivated, interested, and engaged museum professionals who took the challenge with great enthusiasm and commitment.

Examining the “digital” as a challenge to one of the most traditional spheres of private and public life of Russians, the chapter is focused on institutional aspects of the religion digitalization in the theoretical frame of mediatization. Normatively, digitalization as such does not contradict the dogmatic teaching of any traditional for Russia religion, in Christianity, Judaism, Islam and Buddhism theologically it is being considered as a neutral process with good or bad consequences depending on human will. Therefore, functionally digital technologies are seen by religious institutions as a shaping force, one more facility (channel, tool, space, network) for effective preaching while the core of religious practices still remains based on non-mediated interpersonal communication.

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.

This paper suggests that Soviet communicative control was based on a particular balance between the manipulation of mass communication (propaganda) and restriction of interpersonal communication and particular elements of social mobility control (e.g. transport, postal communication and population localization). This particular balance formed a quite stable social structure in which social communications reinforced the state order and hierarchy. We argue that, to a great extent, some elements of this Soviet system of control are reproduced in the current Russian media and social system that has formed a passive attitude towards digital activism and to political life in general among the population. This phenomenon has significantly influenced the contemporary post-Crimean social consensus and caused the failure of the protest movement at the first half of 2010s, which was largely dependent on social media.

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.

Employing Ernesto Laclau’s theory of populism, this paper analyses the populist discourse of the Euromaidan, a Ukrainian movement for European integration. Articulating their democratic demands equivalentially, Euromaidan leaders and activists brought to the field of Ukraine’s discursivity the impossible totality of “the Ukrainian people” fighting against the “anti-popular regime”. The purpose of this study is to trace the formation of this populist discourse by answering the following research question: how did the Euromaidan come to articulate itself as a totality representing the whole of the Ukrainian people? This paper discusses thirteen speeches delivered by Euromaidan leaders onsite in Kyiv’s main square from December 1, 2013, to February 22, 2014.

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 paper investigates how digital surveillance tools used by East Asian governments against COVID-19 affect privacy and personal data protection. It applies doctrinal legal analysis and case study to compare national regulations of these tools as well as their implementation in China, Hong Kong, Macau, Taiwan, Japan, and South Korea. The approaches range considerably from total (China) to selective surveillance, which, however, seems overly excessive towards privacy of certain social groups, exacerbating social stratification and business disruptions in East Asia. The paper argues that selective surveillance models vary across the region from voluntary selective (Japan) to compulsory selective surveillance (Hong Kong, Macau, Taiwan, South Korea) and differ in terms of privacy and related rights. Yet, the increased risks of data misuse and leakages in all the East Asian states and territories need effective legal mechanisms for privacy and data protection that pay sufficient attention to public scrutiny and independent regulators.

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 article attempts to investigate the links between the general civilization processes of globalization, informatization and digitalization with the processes occurring in communication systems mediated by media technologies. As a categorical apparatus that will allow identifying and analyzing these connections, it is proposed to use such concepts as “life world”, “personal world”, “information and communication universum”, “communication matrices”, etc.

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 COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic has affected the entire cultural and entertainment industry around the world, especially cinema. The unprecedented widespread closure of cinemas provided an opportunity to look at the cinema experience from a new angle and re-raise the issue of the opposition between theatrical distribution and streaming services.

In this article, the author examines the state of the cinema market in Moscow during self-isolation from the moment it closed in March 2020 until it opened in August 2020. Presenting, on the one hand, a historical document fixing the chronological sequence of actions during the 2020 pandemic of both cinemas and the Government of Moscow and the Russian Federation, and on the other, conducting a theoretical study of the cinema, based on the theories of Robert Stam “cinema as a temple” and the works of Thomas Elsesser and Malta Hagener on the spectator's body experience during film viewing and comparing cinema with streaming services, parallels are drawn to the historical development of individual and collective viewing (television and cinema / videotapes and cinema, etc.), the author proposes a rethinking of the cinema as a sacred, ritual and public place.

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.