Articles and Chapters
Academic publications
In this open access article for IPPR Progressive Review, Rhys Crilley and I discuss three lessons that Russia's war on Ukraine reveal about public service broadcasting at times of global crisis.
2022
This is article was co-authored with Robert Saunders and Rhys Crilley for an International Journal of Press/Politics Special Issue on youth engagement with media and politics. It characterises RT's ICYMI series of satirical shorts as a path-breaking use of (geo)political culture jamming to court apathy in young media users.
2022
This article, co-authored with Carolijn van Noort in Eurasian Geography and economics, examines Russian-Chinese state media cooperation about the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), noting the asymmetric exercise of power and the differentiated benefits of this kind of collaboration for all involved.
2021
Government Disinformation in war and conflict
2021
This chapter co-authored with Rhys Crilley for the The Routledge Companion to Media Disinformation and Populism, gives an overview of government mis/disinformation in war and conflict. First, it traces developments in thinking around government mis/disinformation in war, and its connection with the development of new communication technologies. Second, it reflects on what exactly may be novel about contemporary practices of government mis/disinformation in war and conflict. Finally, it explores the limitations of current research and suggests potential new directions for scholarship.
2021
This video essay, produced with Darya Tsymbalyuk, for Modern Languages Open, presents a critical-creative engagement with the testimonies of people recently displaced from Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts in Ukraine. Shifting between shadows of plants, drawings and words the video reflects on the ways experiences of displacement and war are narrated, and what kind of stories often remain untold.
2021
This article in Global Society, co-authored with Dr Rhys Crilley, demonstrates that the blurring of news reporting and comedy is key to understanding how Russia's international broadcaster, RT, claims legitimacy for Russia's foreign policy. Humour is also key to understanding how RT's audiences make sese of RT's legitiation claims.
2020
This article, co-authored with Prof Vera Tolz, Prof Stephen Hutchings and Dr Rhys Crilley, examines Russian media coverage of the 2018 Salisbury poisonings. It argues that in today's global communications environment, mediatisation substantially constrains the ability of non-democracies to micro-manage journalists’ treatment of major events relating to national security.
2020
This article, co-authored with Rhys Crilley, combines discourse analysis of RT (formerly Russia Today) ‘breaking news’ YouTube videos of Russian military intervention in Syria with analysis of 750 comments and social media interactions on those videos. It demonstrates how important audiences' affective investments in the identities and events portrayed on-screen are for their understandings of armed conflict.
2020
The year 2017 marked the centenary of the revolutions of February and October 1917 which led to the collapse of the Russian Empire.In what ways did today's globally-integrated, interactive global media environment influence the ways in which the revolutions and their legacies were commemorated for this centenary? In this introduction to a special issue of European Journal of Cultural Studies, Marie Gillespie and I argue that only an explicitly multidisciplinary approach can address the relationship between media and remembrances of revolution across and beyond the post-Soviet space.
2019
Scholars predicted that official Russian commemorations of the centenary of the 1917 revolutions would prioritise ‘reconciliation and accord’ between pro- and anti-communists. As Vera Tolz and I show in the article for European Journal of Cultural Studies, what actually emerged was inconsistent, manufactured dissensus - calibrated to strengthen the ruling regime, not national identity.
2019
Co-authored with Rhys Crilley for Media and Communication 7 (3), this article sets out a methodology for analysing audience affective investments in on-screen representations of war and conflict, and pilots its application on RT's 'breaking news' YouTube coverage of the Syrian conflict.
2019
Co-authored with Dr Rhys Crilley for Stengel, MacDonald and Nabers (eds.) Populism and World Politics Exploring Inter- and Transnational Dimensions (Palgrave Macmillan), the chapter updates discussions of populism and the media, for the present age. Media do not just transmit populist actors' messages: they significantly contribute to production and dissemination of transnational populist communication logics.
2019
2018
In recent years, numerous commentators have blamed postmodernism or poststructuralism for the rise of 'post-truth' politics. In this article, co-authored with Dr Rhys Crilley for Critical Studies on Security, we argue not only that poststructuralism is not to blame for the era of 'post-truth' politics, but that it offers tools than can help us make sense of security in the 'post-truth' age.
2018
To deal effectively with any challenges that RT (Russia Today) represents in the global news environment, we need a better understanding of its appeal. In this open access article for E-International Relations I argue that RT’s operations shed light on a wider range of trends within the contemporary global media environment. The network taps into current trends towards populist communication logics across the global media, and discursively constructs transnational groups of 'us' and 'them' for whom the network presents itself as a moral arbiter.
This chapter in D. Lane and V. Samokhvalov (eds.) The Eurasian Project and Europe: Regional Discontinuities and Geopolitics (Palgrave Macmillan) interrogates the strategies behind Russia's overlapping institutional memberships across Europe and Eurasia.
2015
This chapter in J. Gaskarth (ed.) Rising powers, global governance and global ethics (Routledge) looks at the normative content and motivations behind Russia's adoption of the 'rising power' identity.
2015
2014
In this article in Politics, I note that whilst Russian political elites have long been aware of the power of myths to forge national unity, they have at periods situated core myths within a highly selective narrative of Russian history. Accepted as contextual information for policy discussion, this limited narrative sets cognitive parameters for evaluations of Russia's history, identity and role. It prioritises the state, supports gradualism and continuity, and dramatically reduces the potential for re‐conceptualising Russia's role in contemporary international relations.