Russian Media Lab will organize a panel at the BASEES (British Association for Slavonic and East European Studies) Annual Conference in Cambridge. The panel will take place on Saturday 13th 11.00–12.30, in room Games. See the conference’s full program here.

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In March 2019 RML hosted visiting researcher Polina Kolozaridi, lecturer at Higher School of Economics and founder of club for internet and society enthusiasts. Russian Media Lab asked Kolozaridi several questions about her research and visit Aleksanteri Institute.       

What is your current research about?

My central research now is about the diversity of internet in Russia and internet policies. Together with the club for internet and society enthusiasts we did several studies on internet history and bloggers in Russian regions, but in here Helsinki I focused mostly on the topic of Internet policies.

During my lecture at Aleksanteri Institute I talked about the role of government in regulating internet and the challenge of diversity and fragmentation. In 1996 John Perry Barlow had written the Declaration of the independence of the Cyberspace. This is an important document of the era of global internet. However, 23 years after it cannot be treated as a program document, as far as internet became ubiquitous: it is not a separate space anymore. Internet is flexible, therefore each social group or subculture uses and understands it in their own specific way. For instance, it was demonstrated in “Why We Post” project. Often we continue to treat the internet as something universal and global, as the epistemological approaches are rather rigid. Together with my colleagues we try to rise this problem and find some empirical and theoretical solutions for alternative understanding of internet as locally determined and diversified entity.

One of the empirical solutions is to investigate the variety of what internet might be in different places. In order to do it, we organized research expeditions to the Russian cities: Voronezh, Kazan, Tomsk, Arzamas, Pereslavl-Zalessky, Tyumen. Another solution is to analyse official government documents to understand how they conceptualize internet, its present and future. We still have plenty of field data to analyze, but it is already clear that internet should be understood as an interconnection of infrastructure, use and policies (as William Dutton stated) and also as media and content space. Moreover, the state or business are not homogeneous actors, but consist of very differently-minded groups.

How do you assess the freedom of speech in Russian-language segment of Internet?

I have quite unpopular position here. From my point of view, there are two reductions of this topic: metaphor of cyberspace and State as an extremely important actor.

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by Janne Suutarinen & Olga Dovbysh

Young scholars and early career researchers have less opportunities than more experienced ones to talk about their research to general public. Our blog aims to improve this inequality: today we present new format “Interview with young scholar” where we give voice to BA, MA and PhD students. They will talk about their research and ponder about media freedom and independence in Russia.

Alexandra Barmina a sociologist, holding an MA degree from the Central European University. Her work is placed on the intersection of such research fields as labor studies, political sociology, economic sociology, state theory and cultural studies.

In October 2018, Barmina presented her study “Labor of Independent Journalists in Russia: Doubly Precarious Employment?” in the annual Aleksanteri Conference.

What are the main findings of your research?

Basically, the finding of this research is that the labour of independent journalists in Russia is precarious – not only in terms of the formal foundations of their employment as it is usually discussed in theory but also because of the political system and regime that exists in Russia, which puts some constraints on their work.

The political dimension of precarity, which I introduce, is identified by journalists as the dominant kind of insecurity they face during their daily work. Whereas the economic dimension of precarity, which in theory is generally considered the most important one, tends to be acknowledge and the political precarity neglected. It is possible that I’m not aware of this theory.

The thing is that labour relations are mostly investigated by Marxist scholars who aim to see how the neoliberal economic regime impacts employment and workers. As far as I know, in labour studies there are not many voices taking into consideration the political dimension and the regime’s impact on individual workers. Journalists as cultural or creative workers are in the Western academia largely investigated in the material perspective.

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Russian Media Lab proudly announces the publication of new issue for Studies in Russian, Eurasian and Central European New Media (www.digitalicons.org). The issue is guest edited by RML’s researchers Saara Ratilainen and Mariëlle Wijermars and by Justin Wilmes.

Issue 19: ‘Women and Tech in the Post-socialist Context: Intelligence, Creativity, Transgression’

Since October 2017, the #MeToo campaign has raised awareness of sexual discrimination against women all over the world and showed that participation on digital platforms can and will drive change.

This special issue, in part inspired by the #MeToo movement, is devoted entirely to a feminist perspective on digital media and communication technologies. It wishes to develop our understanding of (hyper)mediated feminisms in post-socialist spaces and to re-connect with gender studies and feminist theory as productive methodological frameworks of digital media studies. Employing a gender and feminist studies approach will also help to reframe and update the current understanding of Russian, Eurasian and Central European new media within the global context of digital information flows and technological development. The question of gender equality is not specific to any country, culture, or geographical context. However, the ways in which gender is discussed and the degree to which gender equality is a political, social or theoretical concern offers an important window to understanding geographically and culturally localized processes.

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