Online Talk on January 14: Sustainability Reporting of Russian Yandex

The first Online Talk on Eurasian Media of the new year sees Olga Dovbysh discuss the sustainability reporting of Russian Yandex.

A Happy New Year 2025 from all of us at TaRC! May it be a prosperous and joyful one to you!

We start our activities in the new calendar year in a familiar fashion: the lecture series Online Talks on Eurasian Media continues in co-operation with the Russian Media Lab (University of Helsinki) as in previous years.

The first talk will take place on Tuesday 14 January when Olga Dovbysh (University of Helsinki) presents her study “Stories about people and technologies: Visualizing the sustainability reporting of Russian Yandex with comics.  

How does Yandex, the leading Russian internet company, represent its own sustainable development and related actions? Dr Dovbysh reviews the visual and textual format of comics in Yandex’s sustainability and ESG reporting. In her ongoing research project, Dr Dovbysh has used a critical visual approach (Rose 2016) and visual analysis to climate change communication (O’Neill & Smith 2014) to review Yandex and their reporting.

The study analyses how comics “about people and technologies” construct discursively the climate imaginaries, and engage communities and the role of technologies. The study opens up further avenues for the discussion of environmental and sustainability communication on the internet – and in particular, the role of BigTech companies in the context of authoritarian and/or resource-rich countries. 

Speaker info:

Dr Olga Dovbysh is a postdoctoral researcher at the Aleksanteri Institute, University of Helsinki. Her research focuses on media and internet control in restricted media regimes, journalistic cultures, and environmental and climate communication. Dovbysh’s recent publications have appeared in the following journals: Journalism, Digital Journalism, Media & Communication, and Social Media + Society. 

Event info:

This Online Talk will be held on Zoom on Tuesday 14 January, 12.00–13.30 Finnish time (GMT+2). The discussion will be moderated by Dr Katja Lehtisaari (Tampere University).

Participation in the event requires registration. Please sign up by Sunday 12 January, 23.59 Finnish time (GMT+2) through this link. Thank you!