Publications

News events with global appeal such as the COVID-19 pandemic, terrorist attacks, mass shootings, plane crashes, and earthquakes are flagship examples of journalistic role performance in action. But so are more ordinary developments like G20 summits, presidential speeches, parliamentary sessions, council meetings, daily crime news, judicial processes, protests, and industry reports. All kinds of news stories and story angles can, at some point or under certain circumstances, serve as exemplars of how the interventionist, loyal-facilitator, watchdog, civic, service, and infotainment roles not only manifest in practice, but also co-exist and interact across and within cultures, topics, types of newspapers, and even single news stories. In this book, we analyzed how professional journalism roles materialize in print news in different organizational, institutional, and social settings, examining journalistic practice under the umbrella offered by the multidimensional concept of role performance. We have made a case for the ever-changing, fluid, and dynamic nature of journalistic roles, which are activated and deactivated by certain triggers, events, and circumstances, showing the extent to which news stories in a given country exhibit indicators of one or more of them.

In order to broaden our understanding of journalism as a complex but meaningfully practiced profession, the main goal of this chapter is to map the general differences and similarities in journalistic role performance—specifically in relation to the presence of the interventionist, watchdog, loyal-facilitator, service, infotainment, and civic roles—across and within 18 countries from Asia, Europe, Latin America, and North America. We provide a descriptive overview of the results and trends identified in our project, focusing on the extent to which commonalities of traditional geographies, media system characteristics, and normative frameworks of professional roles hold true in journalistic performance.

How does peripherality challenge methodology and theory-making? This book examines how the peripheral can be incorporated into ethnographic research, and reflects on what it means to be on the periphery—ontologically and epistemologically. Starting from the premise that clarity and fixity as ideals of modernity prevent us from approaching that which cannot be easily captured and framed into scientific boundaries, the book argues for remaining on the boundary between the known and the unknown in order to surpass this ethnographic limit. Its ethnographic case studies engage with a series of empirical and theoretical issues, including: What is at the centre and what is at the periphery of what we do? How can we represent what lies beneath the threshold of verbal reasoning, or does not respond to the criteria for widely recognised forms of knowledge? Does learning entail unlearning? Peripheral Methodologies shows that peripherality is not only to be seen as a marginal condition, but rather as a form of theory-making and practice that incorporates reflexivity and experimentation.

Earning has been traditionally prescribed to male identity, while housekeeping management to the female. The opening of the labor market for women partly weakened gender inequality and the connection between gender and economic performance. However, that decision only opened a “male” economic role for all and kept the “female”-governing household expenditures underestimated. Based on the data of 37 in-depth interviews with middle-class housewives from Moscow, Russia, carried out between 2014-2019 using grounded theory methodology, the chapter reconstructs two lines of argumentation used by women to justify that management of household expenditures can be chosen as a main economic activity without the shame of failing modern gender standards. The first one is denoted as a “consumptive thrift” or “frugal approach.” It explains expenditures of a household as a form of saving and a way to obtain control over the family’s budget and needs. This approach uses economic rationality to suppress impulsive decisions and emphasize the similarity with actions of earning. The second logic is described as “consumption as social reproduction” or “abundant approach.” It points to the dissimilarity between female-driven spending to male earning. In this view, household expenditures make the family a domain of recovery, satisfaction, and relational work that is impossible without the satisfaction of desires.

This chapter analyses the various ways Russian print media present the deinstitutionalisation of child welfare. The authors argue that media coverage of childcare policies legitimates the ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ agents and practices. By doing so, the media construct a social problem and demarcate symbolic boundaries along several sociopolitical divides, thereby attempting to achieve control through the promotion of an ‘us vs. them’ discourse in Russian public discussions. The authors find that the search for ‘who is to blame’ begins with foreign adoptive parents, and then shifts towards domestic actors in the field of patronat and juvenile justice. It was revealed that many children are on the margins; as the metaphor of ‘last-minute’ children, raised in one article, shows, they are only adopted unexpectedly and, in many cases, not at all. Some themes are missing or very rarely mentioned in the newspapers examined in this study, including professionalisation of care that relates to children’s rights. Children are generally treated as an object than a subject of social relations, victims of circumstances, the living outcome of deficiencies of state institutional upbringing, or a result of poor decisions made by birth parents

The world economy relies on access to industrial metals, oil and gas for maintaining its critical industrial infrastructure. Although demand is likely to remain high, the most accessible deposits have been depleted. Future capacity growth will be facilitated through further technological developments. Therefore, Russia as a leading producer, is paying great attention to strengthening its competitive edge in global markets. This paper reports on a large-scale technology foresight study of the Russian extractive sector (including oil and gas), which combined expert-based foresight activities with statistical analyses and text-mining techniques based on artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies. The presented methodology helped to link the technologies to dominant discussions (e.g. climate change vs rural development) and to flag most suitable partner organisations. Furthermore, quantitative estimates could be quickly identified. The study’s methodology should function as an example for similar studies to support policy planning and investment decisions based on textmining techniques.

Purpose – The growing trend towards closing the political space for civil society in authoritarian regimes has primarily targeted NGOs focused on rights-based advocacy. Drawing on a study of disability NGOs in Russia, this paper seeks to contribute to a better understanding of the advocacy options that nonprofit organizations have even in repressive political contexts. The authors first review the extant literature to identify common actors, types and tactics and then trace what types of advocacy Russian NGOs are engaged in and what tactics they are able to utilize. Design/methodology/approach – The empirical part of this paper is based on 20 interviews conducted among active participants in disability NGOs in Moscow, St. Petersburg, Perm and Nizhniy Novgorod. Despite not being a representative sample of organizations, the selection of cities and organizations was intended to reflect spatial and structural factors of the field. Findings – The authors find that NGOs are able to pursue a broad range of advocacy activities despite a generally restrictive legal environment for civil society. Research limitations/implications – Research on advocacy in authoritarian countries is often focused on NGOs that are primarily engaged in these activities. This has overshadowed the considerable leeway that nonprofit service providers have to engage in advocacy. Practical implications – Service-providing NGOs should not forsake advocacy activities, even in authoritarian contexts, but can find access points in the political system and should seek to utilize their voice on behalf of their clients. Social implications – Despite general restrictions, NGOs can still find ways to successfully secure social rights, justice and solidarity, provided they accept the supremacy of the state in social policy and appeal to the state’s responsibility for the welfare of its citizens without directly questioning the overall status quo too heavily. Originality/value – We develop a broad framework for various advocacy forms and activities and apply it to nonprofit service providers.

This article examines agenda-setting theory. I compare the results of Levada Center surveys on the most memorable issues of the month with the number of publications on those issues in the Russian press from 2014 to 2016. In total, 884 issues are analyzed in the article. The results of the study confirm the impact of discussions in the media on people’s attention to an issue. The results also show that the discussions in the media one week before the date of polling are more important than the issues covered over the entire month. People better remember those issues that took place shortly before the polling, as well as those issues with intensifying discussions during the period. It is also important to note the role of regional publications in the sensitization of the public to various issues. Issues covered by national newspapers and news agencies but ignored by the regional press are significantly less remembered by the population.

This book constitutes the proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Analysis of Images, Social Networks and Texts, AIST 2019, held in Kazan, Russia, in July 2019.

The 24 full papers and 10 short papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 134 submissions (of which 21 papers were rejected without being reviewed). The papers are organized in topical sections on general topics of data analysis; natural language processing; social network analysis; analysis of images and video; optimization problems on graphs and network structures; analysis of dynamic behaviour through event data.

This volume contains the refereed proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Analysis of Images, Social Networks, and Texts (AIST 2019). The previous conferences during 2012–2018 attracted a significant number of data scientists – students, researchers, academics, and engineers working on interdisciplinary data analysis of images, texts, and social networks.

This article examines how Russian NGOs in the field of domestic violence operate in a legal climate characterised by both state restriction and support. I conceptualise anti-violence NGOs that belong to a network as an ‘epistemic community’ and demonstrate that NGOs in my study faced challenges to the recognition of their expertise by state representatives and to the promotion of their vision of policy change. Yet, these NGOs continued to invest their resources in educational events for state specialists. I propose to theorise these educational events as a means of developing a knowledge-based network that can support domestic violence survivors despite lacking formal mechanisms of inter-agency collaboration.

The Rohingya are one of the most persecuted religious ethnic minorities of the contemporary world. They have been persecuted in Myanmar since the post-coup military regime came to power in 1962. What explains this brutal pursuit of violence against a minority? In answering this question, I trace the genealogy and the ethnogenesis of the Rohingya in Myanmar in a longue durée through an analysis of extant data, both historical and contemporary, and I supplement it with an ethnographic study I conducted in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh. I argue that the emergence of the Rohingya identity is constitutively related with the stateformation, war conquest, and power shifts in Myanmar during precolonial, colonial, and postcolonial times. I demonstrate how the post-coup state of Myanmar – in association with the religious civil society, led by a section of the majoritarian Theravada Buddhist Bamars – provoked religious and exclusivist nationalism and constructed the ‘Rohingya Muslims’ as the enemy ‘Other’. I demonstrate also how the democratization of Myanmar ironically exacerbated the problem. The Rohingya themselves – once alienated and un-imagined from the national space – embraced this identity of victimhood to design their resilient and oppositional disposition against an exclusivist state, which further politicized and reified the identity.

Cognitive factors are known to influence lay assessments of causality and blame for negative side effects of intentional actions but specific social determinants of such assessments remain relatively unexplored. In a full-factorial, intraindividual experiment using two blocks of analogous vignettes constructed for two particular institutional action domains (“medical” and “corporate dress code”), we tested the propositions that causality and blame judgments differ between (a) domains and depend on (b) the type of action originator; (c) the type of damage; and (d) the “remoteness” of damage from the originator. Our data demonstrate a significant difference between two institutional action domains: actors in “medical”-related vignettes are generally estimated to be more causally effective and blameworthy than actors in “dress code”–related vignettes. In addition to the pronounced main effects of institutional domain as a factor influencing cause and blame judgments, we revealed few significant interaction effects of the latter with other experimental factors used for vignettes construction.