The 5 ECTS option is meant ONLY for the students of ERS/CBU programme.

Lectures (18 h) + written assignment = 3 ECTS.

Priority will be given to the students of ERS/CBU programme for whom the course is obligatory.

Priority will be given to the students of ERS/CBU programme for whom the course is obligatory.

In recent ten years, new media technologies have changed a significant number of cultural practices on the global and local scales. This course, studying Russian new media culture of the 2000s, aims to analyze specific features of the cultural forms and processes, connected with the wide-spread digital technologies. Focused on the phenomenon of the "Ru.net" (the conventional name for the Russian Internet segment) it interprets transformations of the social life and culture in Russia under the influence of the new means of communication.

Themes and subjects:

• Historiography of the Russian new media culture

• Recent developments in new media technologies and web 2.0 culture

• Communication on the Ru.net. "Netiquette"; rules of the online social behavior

• Representations of the self: constructing a virtual person

• New media communities: social and cultural features

• Russian social nets: Cases of V kontakte and Odnoklassniki

• Russian blogosphere. Case of the "Lifejournal.com culture"

• Twitter, microblogging and instant messengers

• State and civil society on the Net

• Activism, political and civic movements on the Ru.net

• New media and linguistic culture: Transformations of the Russian language

• Phenomenon of the new media literature: "Neterature"

• New media art and music

• Consumption and entertaining culture 2.0

The course is organized in cooperation with Aleksanteri Institute's Russian and East European Master's School.

Russia's historical research goes through changes. One of the key findings has been a new perspective to the research of the Cold War. Earlier this field was dominated by the western-oriented research of history of international relations and diplomacy. Instead of the old (western, super power) bipolar viewpoint, the new research concentrates on eastern perspective and focuses on the levels and actors below the super power and block politics. The assessment of actors and their relations from the eastern viewpoint has changed the perception especially towards the role of the Soviet Union during the Cold War.

The picture of the rest of the world's impact on the internal development of Russia has altered when a new perspective and a longer time span are examined. Interaction and cooperation, transfer of knowledge and learning has become new themes of the research of Russian history. This course introduces the history of the Soviet Union/ Russia in the light of these new findings. Russian history is filled with different continuums, interruptions, new beginnings and changes. Now their significance may be re-evaluated. The lecture examines the history of the Soviet Union to the modern Russia; from Khrushchev and Cold War to Medvedev's policies and economic aspects of the contemporary Russia. Common themes, such as the modernization, will be considered in the course.

The course is organized in cooperation with Aleksanteri Institute's Russian and East European Master's School.

Over the last 30 years a new distinctive trend has become apparent in fiction and visual arts which is often referred to as "horror genre". However, the specificity of this genre as well as a coherent explanation of its popularity has not been delivered yet by cultural studies. On the contrary, there are multiple explanations of the current popularity of vampires. Analyses of particularities of the "horror genre" and vampire fiction and movies will help conceptualize this new trend as "Gothic aesthetics".

In the first part of the course we will consider importance of vampires as the most popular nonhumans. Post-Soviet and the US vampires' bestsellers will be compared to analyze what the figure of monster signifies in contemporary culture. Differently from the US productions, post-Soviet fiction and movies populated by all kind of nonhuman monsters reveal the work of suppressed memory of Stalinism and describe a new social order emerging in post-Soviet Russia. The course will consider post-Soviet fiction and movies as a particular source to study historical memory.

The second part of the course will be focused on the origins of Gothic Aesthetics which departed from Gothic novel and works by Russian classical writers. We will examine why nightmares became am important theme for several outstanding writers such Charles Robert Maturin, Nikolay Gogol and Feodor Dostoevsky and how literary experiments conducted by these outstanding writers with their readers and their protagonists influenced contemporary culture. 

The course is organized in cooperation with Aleksanteri Institute's Russian and East European Master's School.

This interdisciplinary course familiarizes students with the Russian gender system and its historical development from the Soviet era to the present day and with discussions in feminist theory and methodology. It traces gendering practices in different spheres of life and examines how gender intersects with other differences, such as nationality, ethnicity, sexuality, and class. It also examines how gender has demarcated the boundaries between the private and the public spheres at different times and political circumstances, and how gender has structured and been structured in social and cultural transformations. The course consists of lectures and group discussions based on course readings.

The course is organized in cooperation with Aleksanteri Institute's Russian and East European Master's School.

The course explores Soviet and post-Soviet Russian films in their ideological and imaginative relationships to different historical and political contexts. The course aims at making students familiar with how gender is used as an analytical tool in film analysis, and how feminist film theories can be used in specific contexts of film-production and various national film practices. The course will also examine how Soviet and Russian films of the 20th c. textually negotiated and re-negotiated conditions of being, belonging and becoming for gender and ethnic identity in Soviet trajectories of domination and subordination and post-Soviet transformations. The course will include discussions of politics of representation of gender, race and ethnicity in Soviet and Russian popular cinema of different genres (comedy, adventure, adaptation, historical and combat films) as venues for developing fantasies of cultural identity, gender normatives and racialiased social stereotypes. The course will particularly attend to the construction of race and Orientalist discourse in Soviet popular cinema.

The course is organized in cooperation with Aleksanteri Institute's Russian and East European Master's School.