Publications

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 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.

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.

The visual art of the last decades privileges, explicitly or implicitly, social rather than art historical or aesthetic issues. In sites ranging from university classrooms and journals to museums and biennials, the emphasis is usually put on how effectively art handles the social issues of the day while questions of aesthetic value are often treated as suspicious and ideological. Given this anti-art character in these contexts of mediation, the insistence to perceive the objects as artistic objects constitutes a paradox that has been rarely discussed in sociological terms. This article draws on ethnographic research in order to explore “biennial art” that is to say the art that displayed in contemporary art and international platforms of showcasing. These platforms struggle to maintain a concept of art as social practice while at the same time nurture an exclusive and highbrow environment in which “artfulness” is key. I call this quality artfulness so as to both underline its artificiality as well as the inventiveness and skills required for its production. Artfulness in these sites is enabled through various formal or informal rituals of valorization, including guided tours, curatorial statements, media promoting activities and artist talks. These rituals, positioning certain objects within the sphere of art and producing them as objects meriting aesthetic interpretation, resemble the politics of publicity found in aesthetic capitalism at large.

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.

Traditionally, regional mass media has been the least-studied component of the Russian media system; however, beginning from the 2000s, transformations in the nation's political and economic spheres have influenced the position of local media. This paper provides a deeper investigation of the processes and patterns underlying the development of regional mass media in modern Russia. The research is grounded on an analytical review of secondary sources, which is supported by 14 in-depth interviews with media professionals from 5 regions in Russia. The results reveal that Russia's regional media outlets operate both as commercial actors and public service actors. This duality is rooted in several multidirectional and controversial changes in the nation's economic and political systems, as well as in a journalist culture which causes media outlets to have a vague understanding of their places and functions in society.

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.

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.

The purpose of this book is to develop academic skills of writing an extended essay. The process of developing this skill consists of six steps: title analysis, writing an introduction, main part paragraph development and writing a conclusion. Two lessons are devoted to writing an abstract and a summary. The last step is compiling bibliography. During this course attention is given to ways of avoiding plagiarism and punctuation issues.

The book contains Appendix with sample essays written by ICEF and School of Design students (National Research University Higher School of Economics). It is meant for classroom work but can be used for self-study, too. 

 

Organizational crisis communication: A multivocal approach by Finn Frandsen and Winni Johansen, renowned crisis communication researchers from Aarhus University, could potentially grow to be a milestone work in the field for two reasons. First, it contributes to the integration of crisis management and crisis communication into a single multidisciplinary and multidimensional research area. Second, the authors set forward the theory of rhetorical arena and the multivocal approach to crisis communication as a complex and dynamic interaction of many voices beyond the organization in crisis. In addition to the above, Frandsen and Johansen pay particular attention to cultural differences that should be taken into consideration in crisis communication research and practice. Significantly, the book introduces the reader to a variety of case studies and examples of organizational crises and crisis communication in Denmark. Students and crisis communication scholars will also benefit from the detailed outline of preexisting theories and methods, and from the focus on debated and under-researched aspects of the field. Practitioners in their turn may also find the book useful though it is not a how-to guide but rather an invitation to critically reflect on managing crises in today’s complex environment.

Political Internet meme is an underresearched contemporary phenomenon situated at the interface of digital media and political communication. Regarded as a unit of online transmission of cultural information, such a meme can be considered, on the on hand, as a manifestation of post-folklore, and on the other hand, as a mechanism of political participation and construction of social media users’ collective identity. The article presents the results of investigation into Internet memes generated by protest discourse in Runet (Russian Internet). Examination of a vast amount of Internet content allows drawing conclusions as to the thematic emphases of protest actions represented in Runet’s memosphere and to the specifics of the image of Russian protest as reflected in memes.

Doctoral education has experienced dramatic changes all over the world in the last three decades. Currently, Russia is at the beginning of a doctoral education transformation to structured programs according to needs of knowledge-based economies. This paper aims to identify national-level barriers to PhD completion in Russian doctoral education. The data from the empirical study in highly selective Russian universities that participate in a special government program were employed. About 40% of all doctoral students participated in the Russian Federation study at these universities. The following problems were revealed and discussed in the research: (1) problems of transition to a structured model of doctoral education, (2) diffusion of doctoral education’s goals, (3) unpreparedness of Russian universities for the massive expansion of PhD education, (4) ineffective mechanisms of doctoral student selection, (5) a lack of funding and a need for doctoral students to have paid work, (6) excessive dependence on supervisors and (7) insufficient study time and skills for meeting the requirement for publications before the date of defence. Some problems correlate with the global challenges, but some are unique to the Russian institutional context. The relevance of the Russian case to understanding the worldwide transformation of the doctorate is discussed.

In this paper, we propose an alternative approach to analysing the current duality of the Russian media system, which for a long time was regarded as transitional. We propose to interpret the current Russian media system in terms of institutional conflict between norms, which were artificially implemented and the grounded informal rules embodied in everyday practices both from market agents and audiences. Mainly implemented after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the norms were based on a neo-liberal representation of the media system, involving financial independence of the media from the state, a ‘news culture’ instead of a ‘propaganda culture’ and so on. At the same time, the informal rules were based on the paternalistic role of the state, the accessibility tradition and the fragmentation of the public sphere. The interaction of such elements forms the dualist or ‘uncertain’ character of the media system.

Since around 2000, the strategies of participation and compromise in socially engaged art have contributed to modest victories providing at the same time an excuse to left-wing intellectuals to work with institutions of power. While these strategies allude to the redundancy of gestures of negation, the rise of explicitly far-right or neo-fascist tendencies in today’s world can challenge their efficacy from an emancipatory point of view. This article draws on recent art practices to think through modalities of oppositional intransigence and disaffirmation as means to achieve political ends, including negation, zealotry, heroism and sacrifice. At least since the early 1990s, these modalities have been largely viewed with distrust in cultural and critical theory for allegedly reproducing epic, pure and fixed identities, certainties or grand narratives Yet, as this article discusses, intransigence and the construction of sacrificial lifestyles or heroic representations was and will be part of any struggle for social equality in which individuals or collectives put their lives and well-being at risk so as to construct a better future.

The article provides a comparative analysis of reflection on the boundaries, functions and interactions of PR, marketing and integrated communications of Russian higher education teachers ((conventionally, theorists) and employees of PR agencies and PR departments of companies (conventionally practitioners). The problem of approaches to the definition of areas These disciplines are still relevant and have a certain impact on the Russian communicative practice.

This article presents the results of a cross-institutional survey on PhD students’ supervision at Russian universities. It is aimed at answering three questions concerning (1) styles of PhD supervision and their prevalence, (2) the relation between supervision style and PhD students’ satisfaction with their supervisor, and (3) the relation between supervision style and PhD students’ expected time-to-degree. We propose the empirically driven categorization of six supervision styles: superhero, hands-off supervisor, research practice mediator, dialogue partner, mentor, and research advisor. The most problematic category, characterized by providing no help for PhD students, was named “hands-off supervisors.” For this category PhD students reported the lowest level of satisfaction, and the highest expected time-to degree. Nonetheless, the large share of PhD students who are satisfied with hands-off supervisors may evidence a presence of a disengagement compact between PhD students and supervisors in Russian universities. Two categories of supervisors characterized by the highest level of PhD students’ satisfaction and shortest expected time-to-degree were named “superheroes” and “mentors.” These supervisors are reported to perform managerial and expert functions, which emphasizes the critical importance of these functions.

he “Greek Crisis” in Europe: Race, Class and Politics, critically analyses the publicity of the Greek debt crisis, by studying Greek, Danish and German mainstream media during the crisis’ early years (2009-2015). Mass media everywhere reproduced a sensualistic “Greek crisis” spectacle, while iterating neoliberal and occidentalist ideological myths. Overall, the Greek people were deemed guilty of a systemic crisis, supposedly enjoying lavish lifestyles on the EU’s expense. Using concrete examples, the study foregrounds neoorientalist, neoracist and classist stereotypes deployed in the construction and media coverage of the Greek crisis. These media practices are connected to the “soft politics” of the crisis, which produce public consensus over neoliberal reforms such as austerity and privatizations, and secure debt repayment from democratic interventions.

This paper aims to explore the response-order effects for rating questions presented in item-by-item and grid formats. It was hypothesized that the primacy effect occurs for both formats of questions, and that this effect is dependent on age, education, and type of device used for responding to questions. Two randomized experiments were conducted in 28 pre-course surveys of massive open online course students (N = 22,910). Our findings suggest that the order of response options affects respondents’ perception of the option lists and their responding patterns. The primacy effect is found for the item-by-item question, while there is no evidence for the presence of such an effect for the grid question format. Primacy effect for the item-by-item layout is lower for respondents with higher education degree while there are no interaction effects between ordering and age, gender, and type of device. For a grid question, mixed results were observed.

In modern society, tutors often interact with a multicultural student’s audience in the traditional or online format. The majority of tutors emphasize the problem of constructive knowledge transfer in a multicultural learning environment as the main problems in this context, in addition to cognitive, communication, and psycho-pedagogical specifics. The development of education that is receptive to cultures needs not only specialists in different subjects, but also teachers who have knowledge in the cross-cultural differences sphere. These days, training courses and programs including distance learning are monocultural, that is, do not fully meet the needs of students in information society. Thereby, the main question is how to build constructive education in the cross-cultural education context. We claim that nowadays, there is a necessity of training the specialists with a developed cultural intellect. In this paper, we develop some ways of optimizing the education process in a cross-cultural environment.