NEWS

• BBC Monitoring Workshop Thursday May 10 2012

We were delighted to be able to follow up our visit to BBC Monitoring last year (see below) with a joint University of Manchester/BBC Monitoring workshop held at Caversham Park. The group of PhD students and staff from Manchester gave brief presentations on the following topics:

Ilya Yablokov (Conspiracy Theories in Contemporary Russia: Putin’s Re-election)

Irina Clarke (Shifting Conceptualisations of ‘Civil Society’ in Belarusian Media Discourse)

Dr Madeleine Reeves (Migrant workers in Moscow)

Precious Chatterje-Doody (Elite Conceptions of Security: History, Identity and Russian Foreign Policy in the 21st Century)

Emma Heywood (Television News Coverage of the Middle East Conflict: Russia, France, Britain)

Vera Tolz and Stephen Hutchings (Television Coverage of Putin’s Pre-Election article on ‘The National Question’)

and staff from BBC Monitoring also shared their expertise:

Peter Marshall (The Role of Twitter in Russia's Protest Movement)

Jack Mitchell (LiveJournal's Impact on Real Life in Russia)

Stephen Ennis (YouTube and the rise and fall of the Russian opposition)

Each presentation was followed by lively and stimulating discussion and overall, was a most enjoyable and worthwhile experience. We hope to be able to continue and nurture this collaboration in the future, possibly by a similar workshop held here in Manchester.

 

• Is European Multiculturalism in Crisis? International Debate, Friday 23 March (see Events>Debates for details and scroll down to find the audio recording of the event)

 

• Official Project Launch

Thank-you to all of those who came to the official launch of the project, which took place on Tuesday May 17th from 4pm to 6pm at University Place, room 4.204.

As well as introducing the project aims and objectives, each member of the project team also spoke about how the work is going, and presented a few preliminary observations.

We were delighted to be able to welcome our specially invited guest Dr Elizabeth Teague, a Senior Analyst at the Russian Desk of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. Elizabeth spoke about her work and her interest in the topics investigated by the project, particularly contemporary manifestations of nationalism in Russia.

The launch was open to the public and, after a brief question and answer session, discussions continued during the wine reception. Thanks to all who expressed such interest in the project

 

• Visit to BBC Monitoring

On Wednesday 20 April 2011 we travelled to Reading to visit the team of Russian media monitors and analysts working at BBC Monitoring, Caversham Park. We were made most welcome and spent a very enjoyable and productive day taking a tour of the site and speaking with people about their work. During the lunch hour, we gave a brief presentation outlining our research project, including some very preliminary observations made from our quantitative analysis of Russian daily news programmes and from our case study material on the December 2010 street violence in Manezhnaia Square, Moscow. Our audience was interested and knowledgable and the question and answer session provided some very useful feedback.