This academic year’s antepenultimate edition of Online Talks on Eurasian Media – the collaborative initative between TaRC and the Russian Media Lab (University of Helsinki) – is soon upon us!
On Tuesday 14 April we will hear from Svetlana Chuikina (University of Karlstad, Sweden) who will present her study “Infrastructuring the Counterpublics: Distributed Attention and Anti-War Civic Engagement in Russia and in Exile”.
The study elucidates how the bonding process between audiences, anti-war activists, media infrastructure and its affordances have been perceived, enacted and imagined among grassroots anti-war initiatives.
Chuikina asks how both Russian activists and ordinary citizens reflect and narrate their involvement with anti-war activism and the role of media technologies. In what ways do these actors imagine, decode and enact platform affordances in renegotiating the forms of communicative interaction and how does technology bridge broad and dispersed actors, in an authoritarian political context of strict surveillance?
Speaker bio:
Svetlana Chuikina is a PhD Candidate in Media and Communication Studies in Karlstad University, Sweden. Chuikina’s dissertation examines how digital media has been mobilised as a heuristic instrument to reconfigure public attention – as infrastructures for anti-war civic engagement in Russia and in exile.
During Chuikina’s doctoral education, she conducted a traineeship at Scuola Normale Superiore at the Centre for Social Movement Studies, Florence and at the Freie University at the Institute for Media and Communication Studies, Berlin.
Event information:
This Online Talk will be held on Zoom on Tuesday 14 April 2026, 12.00–13.30 Finnish time. Discussion will be moderated by Dr Katja Lehtisaari (Tampere University).
Participation in the event requires registration. Please register via this link before Sunday 12 April 2026 at 23.59 Finnish time.