NB! The list of teachers is subject to change and will be updated as new information becomes available. Latest update: 2 September 2019.
Here are the confirmed teachers of TaRC’s Master Class week 2019, Gender, Media and Leadership: Women in Chinese and Russian Media, to be held in Tampere 28 October–1 November 2019. They will be supported by members of TaRC.
Visual Representations / Russian Work Group
Lyubov (Ljuba) Mulmenko
Ljubov Mulmenko is a screenwriter and playwright who was born in Russia in 1985. She graduated from Perm State University, the Department of Philology, and she currently lives and works in Moscow.
Mulmenko’s first works as a playwright were theatre productions: Ammonia Children (director Boris Pavlovich) and Alconovels (director Lera Surkova). In addition, she was working with Russian directors Jury Muravitsky and Mikhail Ugarov, German director Georg Genoux and American director Igor Golyak.
Lyubov Mulmenko has participated in workshops such as the Royal Court Theatre Workshop (Russia/England), Women Playwrights Around the Baltic Sea (Finland), Russian Film Series program (USA).
Since 2012 she has been writing mostly for cinema. Selected filmography: Fidelity (2019), Kids (2017, TV-series, pilot), Hope Factory (2014), Another Year (2014), Name Me (2014). Currently, Mulmenko is preparing for the shooting of her debut film in Serbia.
Liudmila Voronova
Liudmila Voronova is a Senior Lecturer in journalism at Södertörn University (Sweden), where she coordinates the International Master’s Program in Journalism, and teaches and supervises students at the Master level. Her research interests include gender and journalism, political communication, media and conflict, and, recently, photography and educational processes.
She has studied journalism cultures in Russia, Ukraine, and Sweden. In 2014, Liudmila defended her doctoral dissertation Gendering in Political Journalism: A Comparative Study of Russia and Sweden. She gives lectures on gender and intersectionality for Bachelor students, and she has conducted several trainings for journalists, politicians, and lecturers from different countries on the topic. She is also engaged with the issue of gender equality in the framework of cultural activities of “Nordkonst” NGO, where she is a board member.
Liudmila got a passion for gender and journalism studies when she was a student at Moscow State University, and got a chance to be on exchange in Sweden and Finland. She believes that it is important to always have the critical, reflexive gender lenses on, whatever activity one is involved in.
Visual Representations / Chinese Work Group
Gina Marchetti
Professor Gina Marchetti (University of Hong Kong) teaches courses in film, gender and sexuality, critical theory and cultural studies. Her books include Romance and the “Yellow Peril”: Race, Sex and Discursive Strategies in Hollywood Fiction (1993), From Tian’anmen to Times Square: Transnational China and the Chinese Diaspora on Global Screens (2006), Andrew Lau and Alan Mak’s INFERNAL AFFAIRS–The Trilogy (2007), The Chinese Diaspora on American Screens: Race, Sex, and Cinema (2012), and Citing China: Politics, Postmodernism, and World Cinema (2018).
She has co-edited several anthologies, including Hong Kong Film, Hollywood and the New Global Cinema (with Tan See-Kam, 2007), Chinese Connections: Critical Perspectives on Film, Identity and Diaspora (with Peter X Feng and Tan See-Kam, 2009), Hong Kong Screenscapes: From the New Wave to the Digital Frontier (with Esther M. K. Cheung and Tan See-Kam, 2011), and The Palgrave Handbook of Asian Cinema (with See Kam Tan and Aaron Magnan-Park, 2018).
Her current research interests include women filmmakers in the HKSAR, China and world cinema, and contemporary trends in Asian and Asian American film culture.
Visit the website https://hkwomenfilmmakers.wordpress.com/ for more information about her work on Hong Kong women filmmakers since 1997. To register for her Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) on Hong Kong cinema, go to https://www.edx.org/course/hong-kong-cinema-through-a-global-lens-0.
Tatu Laukkanen
Tatu-Ilari Laukkanen received his PhD in 2017 from the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of Hong Kong. Dr. Laukkanen is a film scholar and maker affiliated with the Faculty of Information Technology and Communication Sciences at Tampere University. He is a specialist on the BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India and China) as a cultural bloc and is a member of the University of Tampere network of BRICS Media Research and also a member of TaRC (Tampere Research Centre for Russian and Chinese Media).
His ongoing research/interests are gangster and crime film, the representation of the state and its organs versus the market, geopolitics, war films-nationalist blockbusters, films on real estate and the home, and films about the Arctic.
Media Industries and Women’s Leadership
Natalia Bitten
Natalia Bitten is a journalist, media trainer and gender equality expert focusing on Political Science and Gender Policy in the Mass Media. She has done extensive research and analysis into the media treatment of women’s issues and equal rights. She has taken part in professional workshops and seminars with leading scientists and specialists on gender policy. She has had articles published in newspapers and scientific magazines.
As a journalist, she wrote columns on topics related to feminism, gender equality and human rights, which were published in major national newspapers. She has been invited to speak on these issues both on national radio and television.
As a media trainer, she has devised and run courses in news and features, reporting on human rights and women’s rights, as well as editing in Russian and English for newspapers and magazines, both in print and online. She has provided workshops on the topics of freedom of speech, professional ethics, and the regulation of the mass media community. Her work has received awards from the Russian Union of Journalists and the International Labor Organization.
Susan Meriläinen
Susan Meriläinen is a Professor of Management at the University of Lapland, Finland. Her main area of research is feminist theorizing of organizations and management, with a particular focus on feminist activism at work.
She has, for example, intervened in the gendered practices of her own work community. Detailed accounts of her joint interventionist work with Saija Katila have been published in Gender, Work and Organization. “Time’s up! Feminist Theory and Activism Meets Organization Studies”, a special issue edited together with Emma Bell, Scott Taylor and Janne Tienari, is another good example of her feminist activism in academia. Susan’s current projects relate to the embodied and material aspects of feminist knowledge production practices and their potential to challenge the patriarchal social formations of academic work.
Her work has been published in organization and management journals, such as Human Relations; Organization; Management Learning; Gender, Work and Organization; Journal of Management Inquiry; Culture and Organization and Gender in Management: An International Journal.
Activism and Modes of Resistance / Russian Work Group
Galina Miazhevich
Galina Miazhevich is a Senior Lecturer at the School of Journalism, Media, and Culture at Cardiff University, UK. Galina has published extensively in peer-reviewed journals and co-authored several monographs. She organised a number of international academic events, including the Gorbachev Lectures on Press Freedom held at Christ Church, University of Oxford in 2011.
Galina currently leads an AHRC grant (2018–2020) exploring media representations of non-heteronormative sexuality in Russia. Galina’s research interests include media representations of Islam and multiculturalism in Europe; media and democracy in post-communist Europe; feminism, gender and media.
Galina serves on editorial boards of several international journals, and she is an executive board member of ECREA (European Communication Research and Education Association). Galina regularly contributes to BBC Russian service.
Olga Andreevskikh
Olga Andreevskikh is a final-year PhD candidate at the School of Languages, Cultures and Societies of the University of Leeds (UK) and a member of the BASEES study group for (Digital) Media and Culture. She specialises in contemporary Russian media and LGBTQ discourses.
Prior to the PhD programme at Leeds, Olga had worked as Assistant Professor in English and Russian Studies at the Nizhny Novgorod State Linguistics University and the Nizhny Novgorod Branch of the Higher School of Economics (Russia). Working on a diverse range of topics throughout her academic career, Olga has contributed to conference proceedings, edited volumes and peer-reviewed journals, her most recent publications focusing on the mediation of non-heteronormative gender and sexuality and on the LGBTQ-rights movement in contemporary Russia.
Apart from her academic career, Olga has been involved in LGBTQ-rights activism and has co-founded LGBTQ-catering groups in Nizhny Novgorod, Russia (2014) and London, UK (2017).
Activism and Modes of Resistance / Chinese Work Group
Bu Wei
Bu Wei is a Professor at the Institute of Journalism and Communication (IJC) in the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS).
Currently, she holds posts such as member of the Standing Council of China Youth Research Association, member of the board of the Women Studies Society of China, and expert of Think Tank for National Working Committee on Children and Women under State Council.
Bu Wei mainly does research on communication for development and social change. Since 1990, she has published over 10 books and 200 articles on topics such as media empowerment for marginal groups, feminist media studies, children/youth’s media participation, media literacy education, NGOs’ communication activisms, art activism for social change, and migrant workers’ cultural studies.
Bu Wei is also an activist in the practice of communication for development. In her work with peasants, workers, migrants, trafficked women, minorities, rural youth, people with disabilities, people with HIV/AIDS and other groups, she has explored theories, models, and action guidelines through pilot practice and action research.
Marina Svensson
Marina studied Chinese, Asian studies, history and other topics at Lund University, where she also received her Ph.D. in Chinese in 1996. She is since 2014 Professor of Modern China Studies and since October 2016 the director of the Centre for East and South-East Asian Studies, Lund University.
Marina’s research focuses on a range of different topics related to contemporary Chinese society, including human rights debates and struggles, journalism and China’s media ecology, documentary film and visual cultures, and different aspects of China’s digital developments.
She has been project leader for a number of different interdisciplinary research projects, for example on Chinese law, investigative journalism in China, and China’s digital society. She has organised many international conferences and has also arranged a number of documentary film festivals.
Her books include Debating Human Rights in China (2002), Gender Equality, Citizenship and Human Rights (co-edited with Pauline Stoltz, Sun Zhongxin and Qi Wang, 2010), and Chinese Investigative Journalists’ Dreams (co-edited with Elin Sæther and Zhang Zhi’an, 2013). Marina has also served as an external reviewer of articles to numerous academic journals.