Sanna Turoma, Professor of Russian Language and Cultural Studies
Sanna Turoma is Professor of Russian language and cultural studies at Tampere University. Educated at the University of Helsinki and Columbia University (USA), she specializes in culture, literature and the humanities in Russian area studies. She is the author of Brodsky Abroad: Empire, Tourism, Nostalgia (University of Wisconsin Press, 2010) forthcoming as a Russian translation in 2020. She has also co-edited Empire De/Centered: New Spatial Histories of Russia and the Soviet Union (Ashgate, 2013) with M. Waldstein; Cultural Forms of Protest in Russia with B. Beumers, A. Etkind, and O. Gurova (Routledge, 2017); Religion, Expression, and Patriotism in Russia with K. Aitamurto and S. Vladiv-Glover (ibidem, 2019), and Russia as Civilization: Ideological Discourses in Politics, Media, and Academia with K. J. Mjør (Routledge, 2020). She is also the co-editor and co-author of the first Finnish-language textbook on the history of Russian literature, Venäläisen kirjallisuuden historia (Gaudeamus Helsinki UP, 2011, 2015) with K. Ekonen.
sanna.turoma@tuni.fi
Iiris Ruoho, Senior Lecturer and Adjunct Professor of Journalism and Mass Communication, Head of the Communication Sciences Unit
Adjunct Professor, Senior Lecturer Iiris Ruoho is working in the field of journalism and media studies at Tampere University. She is well known for her feminist media and television drama studies in Finland. Nowadays her study interest is in mediated journalistic leadership, gender and digitalization of media and society in Finland, China and Russia. Her latest (2014-) project is about Twitter politics – democracy, representation and equality in the new online public spheres of politics. Her list of publications includes over 100 scientific and other research-based publications and papers. Her latest publications dealt with the journalism and gender (2018) and political power of Twitter (2019) and neoliberal capitalism and BRICS on screen (with Tatu Laukkanen (forthcoming in 2021)). She has been a visiting scholar in the universities of Texas at Austin (1995, 1997), Oregon at Eugene (2006) and Fudan University at Shanghai (2011). During her academic career, she has had several positions of trust, for example the current board membership of the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies. She has been a key organizer of the Sino-Nordic conference on women and leadership Potentiality, Ability and Authority May 23–25, 2016 (Tampere, Finland) and a vice chair the Sino-Nordic conference Digital Culture and Society October 19–20, 2017 (Shanghai, China).
iiris.ruoho@tuni.fi
Svetlana Pasti, University Instructor and Adjunct Professor of Journalism and Mass Communication
Svetlana Pasti is Researcher, Adjunct Professor at Tampere University. She has worked in various projects of the Academy of Finland, the Finnish Ministry of Education, and the European Union related to media and journalism in Russia and Central Europe. In 2012-2016, Dr. Pasti lead one major part of a research project on media systems in the BRICS countries, a qualitative study of journalists using in-depth interviews with them. In 2018-2019, she was a visiting scholar at Fudan University, Shanghai, and St Petersburg State University. Her main research interest is in journalism studies. She is author of two monographs: A Russian Journalist in Context of Change: Media of St Petersburg (2004), The Changing Profession of a Journalist in Russia (2007) and over 30 peer-reviewed chapters and articles in platforms including The Global Journalist in the 21st Century, European Journal of Communication, Journal of Communication and Nordicom Review. She is the author and co-editor The BRICS journalist: Profession and practice in the age of digital media (Special issue of African Journalism Studies, Routledge, 2015), and Contemporary BRICS Journalism (Routledge, 2018).
svetlana.pasti@tuni.fi
Tatu Laukkanen, Film Scholar and Maker
Tatu-Ilari Laukkanen, PhD, received his doctorate in 2017 from the Department of Comparative Literature at Hong Kong University. His thesis started to take into account the screen consequences of the insertion of these huge states into the global economy in a comparative manner, a project that he still continues. A film scholar and industry professional, his current research interests include the gangster and war genres, screen geopolitics, and films about the Arctic. His recent and forthcoming publications include “Shanghai Gangster Films and the Politics of Change“; Laukkanen & Iiris Ruoho, “Neoliberal Capitalism and BRICS on Screen” in BRICS, Framing a New Global Communication Order? Nordenstreng and Thussu (eds.), Routledge (2021); and “A Prophecy of Bolsonaro: Masculinity and Populism in the Elite Squad Films” in Culture and Politics of Populist Masculinity, Hakola et al. (eds.), Lexington Books (forthcoming, 2021).
tatu.laukkanen@gmail.com
Katja Lehtisaari, Senior Lecturer in Journalism
Katja Lehtisaari, PhD, is a Senior Lecturer in Journalim at Tampere University, Finland and Adjunct Professor (Title of Docent) at the University of Helsinki, Finland. Her research topics have varied from changing media structures and journalism to media business and media policy, often in an international, comparative setting. Having a background in journalism, she completed her doctoral dissertation on Russian business journalism in 2009 (Tampere University). She was Visiting Research Fellow at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, University of Oxford, UK, in 2015 and at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Washington D.C., United States, in 2018. She is Editor-in-Chief of Idäntutkimus, the Finnish review for Russian and East European Studies and her publications include co-edited volumes Philosophical and Cultural Interpretations of Russian Modernisation (co-edited with Arto Mustajoki, Routledge 2017) and Freedom of Expression in Russia’s New Mediasphere (co-edited with Mariëlle Wijermars, Routledge 2019).
katja.lehtisaari@tuni.fi
Saara Ratilainen, Senior Lecturer in Russian Language and Culture
Saara Ratilainen, PhD, Senior Lecturer in Russian Language and Culture at Tampere University, is an expert in Russian media and digital culture. She has worked extensively on Russian and post-Soviet gender and feminist studies and published in Feminist Media Studies (2014) and co-edited the special issue ‘Women and Tech in the Post-Socialist Context: Intelligence, Creativity, Transgression’ (Ratilainen et al. 2018). She co-edited a special issue for Cultural Studies ‘Culture in Putin’s Russia: Institutions, Industries, Policies’ (Turoma et al. 2018).
saara.ratilainen@tuni.fi
Sinikka Torkkola, Senior Research Fellow in Communication Studies
Sinikka Torkkola is a Senior Researcher Fellow in the Faculty of Information Technology and Communication at Tampere University. She is also a member of the International Council of International Association of Media and Communication Research, IAMCR and vice chair of the Health Communication Working Group of IAMCR. Her research interests include health communication, the gender of journalism, and political journalism. Currently, she is involved in two research projects. In the research project Negative Expertise and the Erosion of the Finnish Information Society at the Turn of 2020 (Negate), she investigates the digitalization of health care and the influence of social media on interactions between health experts and patients. The project is funded by the Academy of Finland. In another ongoing project that aims to recognize and prevent corruption in Finnish society from the viewpoint of group dynamics, she focuses on institutional corruption and analyses a case study of local political decision-making. The project is funded by Kone Foundation.
sinikka.torkkola@tuni.fi
Aleksandr Zelenin, University Lecturer in Russian Language
The main focuses of Aleksandr Zelenin’s interests are studying of linguistic processes in the mass media, linguistic and rhetorical techniques of argumentation and counter-argumentation, multimodal transformations in russian social media, transformation of linguo-cultural concepts in the Russian sociocultural space, studying of bilingualism and multuculturalism. His important publications include the following:
The Language of the Russian Emigrant Press (1917-1939). Tampere, 2007 (in Russian)
From the nature as a “workroom” to a Madagascar cockroach (transformations of the concept of nature in the russian journal Nauka i zhizn’). In: The Ideas of Good Life in Contemporary Russian Mass Media, Ekaterinburg, 2008 (in Russian)
Germans in Russian Culture (linguistic imagology). In: Russian language in school. Moskva, 2013, №4 (in Russian)
“Dad, where is my lipka?”. In: With Love to the Word. Festschrift for Arto Mustajoki. Helsinki, 2008 (in Russian)
aleksandr.zelenin@tuni.fi
Mika Perkiömäki, PhD in Russian Language and Culture
Mika Perkiömäki, PhD, recently defended his dissertation on meanings of the river in 1970–1990s Russian natural-philosophical prose from an ecocritical perspective. The research material consists of autobiographical works of so-called village prose authors from the Siberian countryside. The primary focus of the research is on how the research material represents humankind’s relationship with the river, and what meanings are conveyed from this relationship. Perkiömäki’s dissertation will show how Russian literature handled questions related to environmental justice, material ecocriticism, and the Anthropocene through the image of the river already before these concepts had been invented. Apart from environmental criticism, his research interests include Russian environmental history and the North in Russian culture.
mika.perkiomaki@tuni.fi
Eeva Kuikka, PhD Candidate in Russian language and culture
Eeva Kuikka, MA, focuses in her dissertation project on human-animal relations and their representations in indigenous literature of the Russian Arctic. Kuikka asks in her study how the Soviet modernization of Russia’s Arctic areas is reflected in these interspecies relations and how human-animal relations participate in the production of the Arctic space. Kuikka’s research material consists of works written by indigenous authors between 1950s and 2000s, and she reads these works from the perspective of posthumanist and post-colonialist theories. In addition to human-animal relations, indigenous peoples, and the North and Arctic in Russian culture, Kuikka’s research interests include questions of gender and LGBTIQ people in Russian culture.
eeva.kuikka@tuni.fi
Jari Väliverronen, Researcher, PhD Candidate in Journalism
Jari Väliverronen, M. Soc. Sc., is a former journalist who has been involved in international comparative journalism projects, such as the Worlds of Journalism Study and Media Accountability and Transparency in Europe. He has also familiarized himself with the Chinese media system as a visiting scholar at the Fudan University Nordic Centre in 2013-14. His upcoming PhD is concerned with changes in Finnish political journalism in the online era. Apart from political communication, his research interests are in media accountability and journalism ethics.
jari.valiverronen@tuni.fi
Founding Members of TaRC
Arja Rosenholm, Professor Emerita of Russian Language and Culture
Arja Rosenholm, Ph.D. is Professor Emerita of Russian Language and Culture at Tampere University, Finland. She has published extensively on 19th and 20th century Russian literature and culture, especially on gender and ecocritical studies. She is the author and co-editor of Understanding Russian Nature (2005), Russian Mass Media and Changing Values (2010), Topographies and Popular Culture (2015), Meanings and Values of Water in Russian Culture (2016), and Water in Social Imagination. From Technological Optimism to Contemporary Environmentalism (2017). Her previous research project Water as Social and Cultural Space (AQUA) was funded by the Academy of Finland (2012-2016). Her contemporary research project The Changing Environment of the North: Cultural Representations and Uses of Water (CEN) is funded by the Academy of Finland (2017-2021).
arja.rosenholm@tuni.fi
Heikki Luostarinen, Professor Emeritus of Journalism and Mass Communication
In his book, Kiinan median suuri harppaus (Chinese Media’s Great Leap Forward, Into Kustannus 2017), Professor Heikki Luostarinen reports the results of his study on the goals that motivate Chinese investments in international media. After the 2008 Olympics, China invested 45 billion yuan – about six billion US dollars – in the development of its media companies’ international activities. The investments were provoked by the negative coverage that spread internationally about China when it was preparing for the Olympics. Such news included unrest in Tibet and the tainted baby formula scandal. China’s media campaign was described variously as the “Cultural Industries Promotion Plan”, the “Go Out Policy Plan of the Chinese Media” and the “Great External Propaganda Plan” whose aim is “developing Chinese media in order for them to become international disseminators”. Luostarinen examines the goals, means and results of this campaign in the context of China’s foreign policy, economic development and nation brand work.