Publications

This paper explores, mainly from a legal perspective, the extent to which the Russian regulations of traditional TV and online audiovisual media policies have been consistent with the Council of Europe (hereinafter CoE) standards. The study compares between the CoE and Russian approaches to  specific aspects of audiovisual regulation including licensing, media ownership, public service media, digitalization, and national production. The paper first studies the CoE perspective through examining its conventional provisions related to audiovisual media, the case law of the European Court of Human Rights as well as the CoE non-binding documents. The paper then considers Russian national legislation governing audiovisual media and the Russian general jurisdiction courts’ practice on broadcast licensing. The paper suggests that the Russian audiovisual regulations are insufficiently compatible with the CoE standards and more in line with the Soviet regulatory traditions.

In his recent book The Discursive-Material Knot, [Carpentier, N. (2017). The discursive-material Knot: Cyprus in conflict and community media participation. New York: Peter Lang]. Nico Carpentier identifies three nodal points of antagonistic discourse: the need for destruction of the enemy, homogenization of the self as opposed to the enemy, and the radical difference of the enemy. The latter appears when the self and the other are thought to be irreconcilably at odds, and the enemy is presented as inferior. In the more extreme cases, this radical othering leads to a dehumanization and demonization of the other, which makes the destruction of the enemy easier. Using post-Maidan social confrontation within Ukraine and its Facebook discussions as a case study, this paper analyzes how exactly the radical othering and subsequent dehumanization of the enemy is discursively structured, and describe the conditions under which such extreme manifestations of conflict could be eliminated with the ultimate goal of transforming antagonistic into agonistic discourse.

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.

What is hybrid warfare?  And what role does information play in today's conflicts? In the context of the technological/information revolution of the last two decades—which has greatly amplified the danger posed by nonmilitary means of political struggle—Hybrid Conflicts and Information Warfare addresses these questions from the perspectives of both Western and Russian experts. Incorporating both theory and contemporary realities, including the case of the Islamic State, the authors offer a unique dialogue on the nature of conflict in the second decade of the twenty-first century.

within the framework of cultural discourse, the concepts of "brand" and "branding" are considered

The culture of hospitality is seen as a cultural phenomenon. Relevant practices are analyzed.

The phenomenon of business culture is analyzed. The history of the study of this phenomenon in the framework of cultural studies

The tragic death of John F.Kennedy was a major turningpint of the XX century that reflected the global military-political contradictions as well as domestic crisis of American politics

The genesis of culture is considered as the process of the emergence and development of gaming practices. The system of views on the game in cultural science is analyzed.

Сategory "image" is considered in the framework of cultural discourse

Intercultural communication is considered as a cultural form and as part of communication theory.

The tragic death of John F.Kennedy should be addressed not only within the framework of the dramatic changes that occured at the intermational arena in the beginning of the 1960s, but also from the polnt of view of the crisis of American establishment that was underway the the US. Also the internal transformations in the USSR should be considered.

Encyclopedia includes more than 150 articles on applied cultural studies. Reflects the theoretical and methodological foundations of applied cultural studies, its tools, concepts, subject areas, etc.

Defined the concept of "advertising" in the framework of cultural discourse

Public relations are considered as part of the cultural field, as a cultural practice and socio-cultural technology.

2017 was a year of anniversaries in Russian history. It was 100 years since the Bolshevik Revolution and 80 years since the Red Terror – the period of the most massive repressions in the history of our country. In memory of these, in September 2017 the Wall of Grief in Moscow was built.  In June 2017, the Student Agency of the School of Integrated Communications and the Laboratory for Political Science at HSE with the support of the Memory Fund and the GULAG History Museum conducted All-Russia online-based research, which was devoted to student attitudes to the Soviet period of political repressions. 884 students from Russian universities, who were informed about repressions in USSR in the 20th century, answered questions about the preferred forms and channels of communication with the State, Russian media coverage of this topic, and their personal perception of political repressions. 

Philosophical aesthetics is routinely grounded upon a binary opposition separating art, a reflective and contemplative activity, from popular culture, the brute and philistine cultural expressions of the masses. While art is expected to have a broadly conceived educational mission, it has to simultaneously denounce such popular culture forms that involve propaganda, didacticism and immediacy in order to legitimize itself socially. This paper explores the social and political implications of art and left-wing populism through the work of the British artist and taxi driver Mark McGowan and his project Artist Taxi Driver. Employing a direct language and an aggressive anti-neoliberal rhetoric grounded on widespread populist binaries, such as the ‘elites’ and the ‘people’, McGowan enacts a militant artistic persona in his series of YouTube videos. His daily commentary on subjects such as the Greek crisis, the Scottish referendum and the Jeremy Corbyn election both challenges the split between art and popular culture and mobilizes this split as a populist negation of prevalent forms of governance.

This paper examines Russian defamation law and judicial policies to identify the extent to which they have been influenced by international legal standards on media freedom put forward in Europe by the Council of Europe (CoE). The main research method employed in this work is a qualitative comparative analysis of the CoE standards and the Russian national law as well as judicial practice. This paper suggests that the CoE standards have mostly an insufficient influence to the Russian legislation of defamation, and the discrepancy between the Russian and the CoE’s perspectives on defamation has increased during Russia’s membership in the CoE, especially because of the recent amendements on online defamation. The paper also argues that the CoE standards on defamation has had diverse impacts on the Russian judicial practice. The paper suggests that international organisations have the potential to become the main social platforms for resisting “weaponized” defamation but new effective measures should be devised for this.