November 2019, University of Manchester Team Visit (Burchell, K.)
As part of the JHI-UTSC Digital Humanities Fellowship and the Joint Research Initiative between the Universities of Manchester and Toronto, Prof. Kenzie Burchell will be hosting a team of visiting researchers from the University of Manchester in November. In addition to a week-long exchange for Manchester’s Russian Studies PhD student, Lucy Birge, two events are planned. First, at the Faculty of Information there will be a post-graduate and post-doctoral research workshop with researchers from both institutions and, second, at the Munk School of Global Affairs there will be a special guest lecture by Stephen Hutchings, Professor of Russian Studies, hosted by the Centre for European, Russian and Eurasian Studies.
- Thursday Nov. 14, 4pm-6:30pm, Faculty of Information, Room BL538:
Strategic Political Communication and Translocal Media Flows: A Post-Graduate and Post-Doctoral Research Workshop
- Friday Nov 15, 10am-12pm, CERES, Munk School, Room 108N:
Reframing Russia for the Global Mediasphere: The Spies Who Came Back From the Snow, Stephen Hutching, Professor of Russian Studies, University of Manchester
(RSVP required: larysa.iarovenko@utoronto.ca)
Detailed Event Information
Thursday Nov. 14, 4pm-6:30pm, Faculty of Information, Room BL538:
‘Strategic Political Communication and Translocal Media Flows: A Post-Graduate and Post-Doctoral Research Workshop’
As part of the Joint Research Initiative “Conflict, Language and Diplomacy in a Hyper-networked World” led by Professors Hutching (Manchester) and Burchell (Toronto), this workshop brings together researchers from both institutions to present cases from their current research agendas. The first panel includes current and former Faculty of Information students who are developing case studies under the auspices of the SSHRC and JHI-UTSC funded project “Making Responsible Reporting Practices Visible: Humanitarian Crisis, Global Media, and the War in Syria” led by Burchell, a multi-national multilingual comparison of political communication surrounding the Syrian war. The second panel features research being done in Russian and Easter European Studies at Manchester where strategic political communication media forms intersect with the global media ecology spanning Russia, Europe and wider Eurasia.
Panel 1: Faculty of Information, University of Toronto
- Strategic Narratives in Political Communication Online: A Multimodal Approach
Dr. Asen O. Ivanov, Post-Doctoral Fellow THINC Lab, University of Guelph - Locating Journalistic Practice in News Discourse: Institutional Masks & Contingent Hypermediation in Newswire coverage of the Syrian War
Jamie Duncan, MI (Completed 2019) - Affect and Authoring: Citizen Journalists & Institutional Proximity to Conflict within AFP’s Correspondent Blogs
Stephanie Fielding, MI Candidate (Expected 2020)
Panel 2: Russian and Eastern European Studies, University of Manchester
- Sounding Salisbury: Hybrid Audio Media and Interstate Conflict
Lucy Birge, PhD Candidate - Picturing Soviet Uzbekistan: Constructing National Identity in Propaganda Posters, 1920-1936
Mollie Arbuthnot, PhD Candidate - Transnational Affection and Conflict in the New Media Remembering of a Global Media Event: From “Electronic Monuments” to “Shapeshifting Memory Colossi” of Sochi 2014
Dr. Vitaly Kazakov, Post-Doctoral Research Associate, ‘Reframing Russia for the Global Mediasphere’
Friday Nov 15, 10am-12pm, CERES, Munk School, Room 108N:
‘Reframing Russia for the Global Mediasphere: The Spies Who Came Back From the Snow’
Speaker: Stephen Hutchings, Professor of Russian Studies, University of Manchester
RSVP required: larysa.iarovenko@utoronto.ca
Russian journalists are commonly perceived as tools for disseminating their state’s top-down propaganda, particularly when covering topics of significance to national security or foreign policy. Yet, such a view is blind to the role that logics intrinsic to the global media system play in shaping news-making processes. This paper examines how Russian domestic and international broadcasters represented the 2018 poisoning of Sergei and Yulia Skripal in Salisbury, UK, and contrasts this illustratively with the coverage of British domestic and international broadcasters. Our analysis shows how three interrelated logics – securitisation, marketisation and mediatisation – conditioned journalists’ reporting, through a series of temporary and shifting (re)alignments of the interests of state and non-state actors. Journalists in all political contexts operate with the grain of this environment, which entails greater risks for the broadcasters of neo-authoritarian states than democratic ones. Our findings cast doubt upon states’ abilities to instrumentalize the media, and demonstrate the contingency of news-making upon the intrinsic logics of transnational media flows.
