The collaborative initiative between TaRC and the Russian Media Lab Network (University of Helsinki), Online Talks on Russian Media, enters its third year on Tuesday 11 January.
Then, Mika Perkiömäki and Olga Dovbysh from the University of Helsinki present their research project entitled “How is politicization of environmental agenda affecting practices of media professionals in Russia?“ where they discuss the impact of political and media regimes on environmental journalism in Russia.
Their research explores how environmental and climate change related issues are getting politically contextualized in Russian media and what impact it has on the framing of the environmental problems by media professionals in Russia.
Based on the hierarchy of influences model (Shoemaker & Reese 2013), they aim to trace the relationships between individual work practices and routines of media professionals involved in environmental reporting, organizational structure of media outlets, and journalistic ideology as part of the social system.
In their Online Talk, they will present the design of this research in progress, share some cases of environmental reporting in Russian media, and discuss how this work contributes to a general discussion on environmental journalism in different countries and media systems.
Speakers’ bios:
Mika Perkiömäki, PhD, is a postdoctoral researcher at the Aleksanteri Institute, University of Helsinki. His field of expertise covers Russian cultural and media studies, ecocriticism and environmental humanities. His dissertation Imagined Riverography of Late Twentieth-Century Russian Prose (2021, Tampere University) is an ecocritical study on meanings of the river in Russian natural-philosophical prose of the late Soviet period.
He has also studied representations of nature in early Soviet literature of the Pomors, is a member of the Tampere Research Centre for Russian and Chinese Media (TaRC), and the editor-in-chief of Idäntutkimus, the Finnish review of East-European studies. Currently he studies practices of mediatized knowledge production and distribution on fossil and renewable energy and climate change in Russia.
Dr Olga Dovbysh is a postdoctoral researcher at the Aleksanteri Institute, University of Helsinki. She works at the intersection of media studies, critical algorithm studies, and Russian studies. In her previous research, she has examined challenges of algorithmic journalism in Russia and beyond.
From July 2021, she works in the FLOWISION project where she studies the mediated knowledge production on environmental issues in Russia and Finland. Her recent works have been published in, for example, Journalism, Social Media + Society, Demokratizatsiya: The Journal of Post-Soviet Democratization.
This Online Talk will be held on Zoom on Tuesday 11 January, 12:00 to 13:30 Helsinki time. If you still want to participate, please send a message to discussion moderator, Dr Katja Lehtisaari (Tampere University) to receive the link.