In 2015-16 Russian government and media have been accused of ‘hacking the Western democracy’ and ‘propagating the Kremlin ideas in the West’. Russian broadcasters such as RT have been increasingly influential on global arena, causing ‘a crisis of journalism’ and ‘the arrival of the post-truth era’. The course provides an in-depth analysis of the structure of Russian media, paying special attention to transgressive media strategies such as trolling, hacking, and pirating, as well as considering other forms of subversion such as ‘queer’ media. Students will acquire knowledge about Russian media, society and government and their relationship with the world. Students will conduct their own media projects closely examining Russian media. No knowledge of the Russian language is required to take the course.     

The course will take place as an intensive course. Teaching will take place in the evenings, except on Fridays. 

The course will be taught in English; the course will be taught following the British academic tradition with a lot of focus on discussion, critical thinking and individual work.

No knowledge of the Russian language is required to take this course. Some Russian terms will be introduced and explained by the course leader. Social, political and cultural setting for Russian media will be introduced by the lecturer. Guidance on how to write academic essays in English will be provided.

The course will be beneficial for students with background in Russian Studies, Politics, Communication, Media, Journalism, Intercultural Communication, Visual Studies, and Eastern European Studies; however, students with background in other disciplines are also welcome. 

Vlad Strukov is Associate Professor in Digital Culture in  University of Leeds, UK.

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

Lectures look at conflicts in the post-Soviet space, including the sources of conflicts, role of “ethnic factor”, nationalism and religion, development of conflicts, contested problems of foreign interventions (legitimization of peacekeeping operation and use of force), peace negotiations, and actual state of play. The course critically evaluates effectiveness of actions of various state and non-state actors participating in the mitigation, settlement, mediation, negotiation, arbitration, management, and resolution of the conflicts. Apart of the introductory lecture devoted to basic theoretical aspects of regional conflicts and methodology for applied analysis of regional conflicts, each succeeding lecture presents a case study of a specific conflict cluster. The main focus in class discussion is the actual peace processes involving various actors and “windows of opportunity” for conflict resolution which can be opened up in the mutual interplay of the actions and approaches of the conflict parties supported by the appropriate policies of international actors. The main goal of the course is to provide students with the methodological framework for applied empirical analysis of the regional conflicts that could fit various contemporary and historical regional conflicts around the world.

Teaching methods

Teaching methods include lectures, class discussions and students’ presentations in seminars. Students will also be required to write short critically reflective learning diary. The case study lectures are given by the guest teachers from the region in focus.

Teaching

II and III Periods 2017/2018 (31.10.2017-25.01.2018)

Lectures: Tuesdays and Thursdays at 12.00-14.00 (14 hours)

1. Introduction to the course: basic theoretical aspects of regional conflicts, methodology for applied analysis of regional conflicts; main characteristics of the post-Soviet regional conflicts (Vadim Romashov, TAPRI). Tuesday 31.10.2017

2. Ethnic clashes between Kyrgyz and Uzbeks: National and international perspectives (Asel Myrzabekova, Bonn International Center for Conversation/American University of Central Asia). Tuesday 7.11.2017

3. Regional conflicts and history as conflicting resource: Abkhazia and different interpretations of history (Ketevan Gurchiani, Institute of Philosophy, Ilia State University). Thursday 9.11.2017

4. Politics of history, conflict and war in Ukraine (Artem Kharchenko, Politic History Department of National Technical University “Kharkiv Polytechnic Institute”/NGO “Center for Interethnic Relations Research in Eastern Europe”). Tuesday 5.12.2017

5. Regional conflicts, peace processes and mediation in Moldova: Transnistria and Gagauzia (Valentina Teosa, Department of International Relations, Moldova State University). Thursday 7.12.2017

6. North Caucasus: Stable instability (Magomed Gizbulaev, Institute of History, Archaeology and Ethnography, Dagestan Scientific Center of the Russian Academy of Sciences). Tuesday 16.1.2018.

7. Karabakh conflict and the current regional affairs (Artur Atanesyan, Faculty of Sociology, Yerevan State University). Thursday 18.1.2018

Seminars:

1. Thursday 16.11.2017 (Vadim Romashov and Ketevan Gurchiani)
2. Thursday 14.12.2017 (Vadim Romashov and Valentina Teosa)
3. Thursday 25.1.2018 (Vadim Romashov and Artur Atanesyan)

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

The course consists of 10 lectures in the class (20 hours), including 3 guest lectures (6 hours). The students will develop a better understanding of how and why mass media play an important instrumental role in influencing Russia’s domestic and foreign relations in a globalized world.

Preliminary programme

• Lecture 1 (2h) Introduction to Russian domestic and foreign new media landscape
• Lecture 2 (2h) The role of mainstream and alternative mass media in Russia
• Lecture 3 (2h) Media legislation and internet governance in Russia
• Lecture 4 (2h) Strategies of agenda-setting for foreign and domestic audience
• Lecture 5 (2h) The evolution of Russian online media
• Lecture 6 (2h) Russian blogosphere and its regulation
• Lecture 7 (2h) Social media and new forms of journalism
• Lecture 8 (2h) Russian strategic online communication during global media events and issues
• Lecture 9 (2h) Russian soft power and the mediated public diplomacy
• Lecture 10 (2h) Information security and digital communication networks

Course assessment includes active participation in the lectures, 10 pages of individual lecture diary, and 10 page of collaborative essays (2-3 students as co-authors).

NettiOpsu.

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

This course proposes a comprehensive and multidisciplinary analysis of the phenomenal appeal of ideas of nationalism, conservatism, and patriotism, usually accompanied by strong nostalgic emotional investments. This shift from a post-Cold War normative order based on principles of liberalism to a growing traction of illiberal, inward-oriented and largely anti-globalist ideas affects the whole West, but is particularly meaningful and consequential for Europe understood in a wider sense, as comprising the EU and countries of common EU-Russia neighbourhood. Of course, the nationalist U-turn takes different cultural, societal and political forms – from the resurgence of far-right parties in many of EU member states to the nostalgic Communism in some of post-Soviet countries, and needs fine-tuned contextualization that the course offers. It contains country-based case studies (Russia; Austria, Sweden and Estonia within the EU; Georgia and Ukraine among Eastern Partnership countries) that leave much room for cross-national comparisons and useful generalizations.

Deploying these cases in a broad spectrum of academic schools and approaches (from British cultural studies to cultural semiotics) each one having its merits, I, in the meantime, more specifically focus on biopolitical interpretations of nationalism, conservatism and patriotism both as concepts and practices that are produced, transferred and consumed as parts of never-ending nation-building mostly in Russia but also referring to post-Soviet countries such as Georgia, Estonia and Ukraine.

The biopolitical lens presupposes actualization of ideas developed, in particular, by Michel Foucault and Giorgio Agamben, and their extrapolation onto the current political and cultural developments.

The course will take place as an intensive course during spring term 2018, most likely in April.

Teaching will take place in the evening, except on Friday.

Dr. Alexandra Yatsyk is a Visiting Researcher,  Institute of Social Sciences, Vienna & Uppsala University, Sweden

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

In the course main ideas of descriptor theory of metaphors (DTM) are considered. Metalanguage of DTM is presented as an instrument of analysis of public opinion and political thinking through mass-media texts. DTM is used for description and analysis of concrete cases, among which understanding of corruption through metaphors of Russian political discourse and political metaphors as a mark of political crises. The course presupposes that students gain skills for analysis of political texts.

Working language of the course will be English. During the course illustrative exercises will be performed by participants. At the end of the course participants will be offered to write an essay on political metaphors and their role in political discourse and political argumentation.

This course has received financial support from VIE-network.

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

Corpus linguistics can be broadly described as a study of large amounts of texts presented in a machine-readable form. In recent decades, diverse types of corpus studies have gained popularity in linguistics, allowing scholars to draw more grounded conclusions about vocabulary and grammar. However, corpus linguistics can also serve as a tool for interdisciplinary studies at the intersection of linguistics, literary studies, digital humanities, cultural studies, and sociology. Corpus linguistics facilitates so-called “distant reading” of various sources, allowing a scholar to obtain both reliable statistics on the use of specific words, constructions, etc., as well as examples of their use, and these data turn out to be extremely valuable for the study various cultural processes.

After a brief introduction to corpus linguistics, the course will consist of two parts. In the first part, we will discuss the corpora available for studying Russian language and culture, and in the second part we will perform case studies based both on the Russian literature and on more recent texts such as social media, etc. These case studies will cover a broad range of topics, e.g., the rise of gender-neutral language in Russian, the functioning of memes originating on the Web in the Russian-speaking community, etc.

 Course requirements

The course will be held in English. However, at least an intermediate knowledge of Russian (CEFR B1) is required.

The final grade will be calculated based on participation (25%) and a final 10-page research essay (75%), which is supposed to present a case study on a course-relevant topic selected by the student.

Tentative syllabus

Introduction

1. Corpus linguistics: A brief overview.

Resources

1. Russian National Corpus: representing “Standard Russian” of the last 250 years.
2. Russian National Corpus and Stihi.ru: poetic corpora of Russian classical poetry and modern lay poetry.
3. Prozhito.org: personal diaries from the 1st half of the 20th century.
4. Integrum: a collection of Russian press.
5. Google Ngram Viewer: accumulating Russian-language books.
6. ruTenTen, Araneum Russicum Maximum and other Web corpora: representing Russian language of the Web.
7. General Internet Corpus of Russian (GIKR): large-scale corpora of Russian social media (VK.com, Livejournal, Mail.ru blogs).

Case studies

1. Keyword analysis of Russian literary texts. How can one describe the œuvre of a writer without actually reading it?
2. How homogeneous is Russian? Regional variation in Modern Russian captured by language corpora.
3. How to call a female poet: poèt, poètessa, or poètka? Feminism, gender neutrality, and the Russian language.
4. The life-cycle of a meme. How do popular memes like preved medved evolve, stabilize, and die?

 Basic reading list for the course

1. Kopotev, Mikhail, Olga Lyashevskaya, and Arto Mustajoki (eds). 2018. Quantitative approaches to the Russian language. London; New York: Routledge.
2. Koteyko, Nelya. 2014. Language and politics in Post-Soviet Russia: A corpus-assisted approach. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Further references can be found in Kopotev et al. (eds.) (2018: 24–29).