by Olga Dovbysh & Paula Rossi

A year ago we introduced a new section in the blog – interviews with young scholars and early career researchers to represent their views and opinions on the scholarly issues in media and communication studies.

Dmitry Muravyov is a social researcher focusing on critical data studies, data activism, STS (science and technology studies), and internet studies. He is also a member of club for internet and society enthusiasts. Muravyov is holding a BA degree in political science from Higher School of Economics (Moscow). In 2019, Dmitry presented his research at Aleksanteri conference in Helsinki.

Why do you study data activism in Russia? What has drawn your attention?

I am interested in this field of critical data studies, and was inspired by the discussions held in the blog called ‘Big data from the south’. Authors of the blog make an attempt to think about how datafication happens in non-western societies. Simply put, datafication is a process of turning the aspects of social reality into data. I seek to explore how different processes around data and datafication occur in Russia. More particularly, my interests revolve around the questions of human agency, how people react to these emerging social processes and act upon them. For instance, let’s consider a tracking app that converts the amount of sugar you eat per day into data. How would you use this app? What relationships would you build with your datafied self, which you come to know from a variety of apps like this? It is also in many domains a political question: what gets datafied and what does not? How does it reflect and shift existing power imbalances? I see this line of research inquiry as the continuation of the previous discussions on quantification in STS and many other disciplines, but at the same time, new questions emerge along with more and more digital data in our lives.

Continue reading “Data activism and politics of data practices in Russia – Interview with Dmitry Muravyov”

Welcome to a book launch event hosted by Russian Media Lab: ‘Freedom of Expression in Russia’s New Mediasphere’ to celebrate the publishing of the project’s final book, published by Routledge, in December 2019. During the event we’ll held the open discussion and Q&A session with authors and editor of the book.

The event will take place on 16 December 2019, 17:00-19:00 at ThinkCorner (Yliopistonkatu 4, Helsinki). Registration is mandatory! https://elomake.helsinki.fi/lomakkeet/102253/lomake.html

Continue reading “Freedom of expression in Russia’s new mediasphere – a book launch event”

by Teemu Oivo 

Vera Tolz is Sir William Mather Professor of Russian Studies at the University of Manchester and Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences. Since 2017, Tolz has been a team member of the project ‘Reframing Russia for the Global Mediasphere: From Cold War to “Information War”?’. The project studies Russia’s main state-funded international broadcaster RT’s (formerly Russia Today) strategies to connect with its audiences through its various platforms and language versions, and the impact on the audience reception.

Now visiting Helsinki for this year’s Aleksanteri Conference, Tolz follows her project colleagues Stephen Hutchings, Precious Chatterje-Doody and Rhys Crilley as our latest interviewee, talking about the latest findings from the research on RT’s content, campaigns and their audiences.

Continue reading ““What RT is doing is not unique” – Interview with Prof. Vera Tolz (University of Manchester) on fake news, propaganda and commemoration campaign of Russia Today”

More than 40 researchers, interested in media and communication studies, gathered on Thursday evening at Aleksanteri Institute’s meeting room despite dense conference program. There were not enough sitting places for everyone, so some people even stayed in the corridor.

Continue reading “Russian Media Lab Network officially launched now: get-together meeting at Aleksanteri Conference”

Julia Velkova is a post-doctoral researcher at the Centre for Consumer Society Research at the University of Helsinki. Her interests are in digital culture and media. She is currently involved in several projects on the politics and histories of emergent data infrastructures, with specific focus on data centres in the Nordic countries, and the labour, discard and temporalities that underpin their work. Her work has been published in journals such as New Media & Society; Culture Machine; Big Data & Society and International Journal of Cultural Studies, among others.

What is your current research about?

I am interested in the cultures and politics of media infrastructures, and in my current project I engage with the histories, temporalities and thermal politics of data centres that are being built in the Nordic countries. The topic that I have been working most recently on is the ways in which local municipalities and energy companies draw in the platform economy into energy politics, through the use of the thermal discard produced by data centres computing user data – a practice that exists currently in Sweden and Finland.

While we are still debating the implications of algorithms and data aggregation practices, there is a peripheral, and still quite marginal interest from scholars on the relation between digital media and energy. In this context, data centres have been the main target of criticism as they put pressure on local power grids while contributing with more carbon emissions, and at the same time reply on the use of water, which in certain cases is in very fragile ecologies, as Mel Hogan (2015) has written about in the context of Utah’s NSA data centre.

Continue reading “How Russian internet consumption heats Finnish city or Critical approach to data economy and digitalization – Interview with Julia Velkova”

In memoriam our dear colleague and friend Eszter Gantner,

who made this special issue possible.

Russian Media Lab Network announces the publication of a special issue for EuropeNow (https://www.europenowjournal.org). This special feature includes research papers, presented at recent workshop “Politics of e-Heritage: Production and regulation of digital memory in Eastern Europe and Russia”, organized by the Herder Institute for Historical Research on East Central Europe, the Aleksanteri Institute – University of Helsinki and CEES at the University of Glasgow. The issue was guest edited by Eszter Ganter and Olga Dovbysh.

Continue reading “New issue for EuropeNow journal on Digitization of Memory and Politics in Eastern Europe”

This week Aleksanteri Institute hosted a workshop “Media control as source of political power in Central and Eastern Europe”, co-organized by Research Centre for East European Studies at the University of Bremen and Russian Media Lab Network. The workshop brought together an interdisciplinary group of scholars to present their research and to discuss about media manipulation and pressure in various political regimes of post-Soviet countries. The presentations dealt with for example government control in traditional media, media coverage of protest movements, ways of Internet regulation, agency of local journalists in (semi)authoritarian regimes.

Continue reading “Media control matters: workshop on media control as source of political power in Central and Eastern Europe”