Project publications
Flood, Christopher, Stephen Hutchings, Galina Miazhevich and Henri Nickels (2012) Islam, Security and Television News, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Following the end of the Cold War and recent terrorist attacks – such as 9/11, the 2005 London Bombings or Beslan – the presumed existence of an Islamic threat has been discussed and researched extensively. What lacks in the current literature is any substantive comparative, cross-national research on media discourse on Islam, the war on terror and national identity, particularly focusing on television news – still the principal and most trusted source of information for most of the world's population. Focusing on British, French and Russian television news coverage of Islam as a security threat, the book synthesizes approaches from political science and cultural studies, providing the first comparative, interdisciplinary account of how television broadcasting integrates discourses on Islam into distinct, nationally oriented, representational systems. The authors assess how the transfer of Islam-related meaning across national media landscapes shapes, and is shaped by, those discourses.
Flood, Christopher, Stephen Hutchings, Galina Miazhevich and Henri Nickels (2012) Political and Cultural Representations of Muslims: Islam in the Plural, Leiden: Brill.
Harding, Sue-Ann (2012) Beslan: Six stories of the siege, Manchester: Manchester University Press.
This book investigates the reportage of the 2004 Beslan hostage-taking published by three very different Russian-language websites: RIA-Novosti, Kavkazcenter, and Caucasian Knot, tracking the ways in which these three sites constructed six different reports in response to what happened at Beslan, even as events were still taking place. By covering both Russian and English reports, the book also considers ways in which translation impacts on the reconstruction of these narratives. Working from the premises that narratives constitute reality and are fundamental to human agency, the book investigates material never before subjected to scholarly analysis in this depth, contributing to an understanding of Beslan in terms of its significance for Russia’s nation building, civil society and responses to terrorism. The book also reflects on the role of narratives in perpetuating or dissolving violent political conflict, a discussion relevant not just for Russia, but for other, seemingly intractable, conflicts across the world. More information: http://www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk/cgi-bin/indexer?product=9780719085352
Harding, Sue-Ann ‘Remembering Beslan: Official and Grassroots Commemorations’, Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies 43rd Annual Convention, Washington DC, November 17-20 2011. Available here (pdf).
Hutchings, Stephen and Vera Tolz (2012) ‘Fault Lines in Russia’s Discourse of Nation: Television Coverage of the December 2010 Moscow Riots’ Slavic Review 71(4).
This article analyzes Russian television news accounts of the December 2010 Manezhnaia riots that followed an ethnic Russian football fan’s murder by a group of men from the North Caucasus. It focuses on the narrative struggle to reconcile official nation-building rhetoric with grassroots realities and broadcasters’ own assumptions. Using the tools of media discourse analysis, Stephen Hutchings and Vera Tolz demonstrate that national television’s conceptual apparatus consists of a multifaceted amalgam in which interpretations of the Soviet period are modified through the influences of late imperial Russian intellectual traditions and western interpretations of societal diversity. Hutchings and Tolz show how the essentialization of ethnic boundaries within this apparatus leads both to the overinterpretation of interethnic aspects of the crisis, and to their occlusion. Rather than submitting to a univocal state machine, post-Manezhnaia broadcasting reveals fault lines whose partial convergence around a single narrative reflects the restricted logic of the conceptual apparatus and a perceived need to reflect the public mood. More information: http://www.slavicreview.illinois.edu/indexes/vol71/Abstracts714.html#hutchings
Hutchings, Stephen and Vera Tolz, 'Re-Inventing Russia in Television News Commemorations of the "Day of National Unity": Mediation as Fracture', paper presented at theAssociation for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES) 43rd Annual Convention, Washington DC, November 17-20 2011. Available here (pdf).
Hutchings, Stephen (2013) ‘Serialising National Cohesion: Channel 1’s “Shkola” and the Contradictions of Post-Soviet Management’ Russian Review 72(3), 470-491 .
Parliaments rarely debate television serials. Such, however, was the controversy surrounding Valeriia Gai-Germanika's 69-part "Shkola" ("School"), shown on Russia's Channel 1 in 2010, that several Duma Deputies called for its banning. Filmed with hand-held cameras and unknown actors, "Shkola" offered an uncompromising insight into problems afflicting Russian schools: racism, corruption, casual sex, suicide, drug-taking, self-harming, bullying, bribery, violence, and unremitting disorder in classrooms characterised by unimaginative teaching. "Shkola" posed unprecedented challenges to the boundaries of the permissible. This article, however, evaluates the serial's capacity to foster national cohesion, not in the "top-down" manner characteristic of state media events such as Victory Day, but through a multi-levelled dialectic of centre and periphery. Drawing on Jesus Martin-Barbero's mediation theory, the article traces the dialectic through the serial narrative's split structure: its oscillation between a naturalistic aesthetic based on metonymic displacements from society's centre to specific conflicts at its margins, and a melodramatic sentimentalism suited to the metaphoric modelling of that centre and the articulation of a discourse of universal empathy. The dialectic facilitates a mutual engagement of voices (official patriotic, Soviet nostalgic, nationalist extremist, liberal oppositionalist, vernacular racist) in which each contaminates or revitalises the other and in which Gai-Germanika's preferred universalist stance fails to prevail. The article includes an assessment of the broader implications of "Shkola" for public discourse in Russia.
Hutchings, Stephen (2013) ‘The Gypsy as Vanishing Mediator in Russian Television Coverage of Inter-Ethnic Tension’, Nationalities Papers (published online in May 2013).
The article addresses the representation of gypsies in Russian television news bulletins and popular drama series over a 15-month period. It seeks first to explain the prominence of the media image of the gypsy relative to the size of the Roma population and second to account for the relationship between fictional and non-fictional modes of representation. Situating itself within the broader field of post-Soviet Russian identity studies and applying qualitative tools differentiated according to the arena of analysis, it looks at questions of lexicon, voice and viewpoint in relation to news and issues of characterization, fictional space and plot with respect to drama. The two apparatuses are linked through a shared emphasis on narrative, and in particular on its dual orientation toward the exceptional (what makes a story worth telling and capable of embracing “difference”) and the typical (what enables it to represent and project “identity”). In its central argument it maps this dual “identity/difference” dynamic onto the gypsy's liminal status as both “of the self” and “of the other”, and its mediatory function: the ability to serve as a proxy for ethno-cultural difference more generally, and to negotiate the tensions between the cultural and racial aspects of ethnicity.
Open access: available here (html and pdf)
Hutchings, Stephen and Christopher Flood, Galina Miazhevich and Henri Nickels (2011) Islam in its International Context: Comparative Perspectives, Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
Hutchings, Stephen, Christopher Flood, Galina Miazhevich and Henri Nickels (2011) ‘Transnationalising Islam: Theoretical Challenges and Cosmopolitan Potential’, in Islam in its International Context, pp. 14-36.
