No abstract

The election protests in Moscow in December 2011 signified an important moment for Russian society. Political dissent, historically reserved for the private domain of Soviet kitchens and in recent years to the regulation-free space of the Russian Internet (RuNet), entered the public space of Moscow streets. Just like the protests revealed the long-held tension between the political discussion (and action) in Russian public and private spheres, the coverage of the protests by different media brought to light similar struggles in Russian journalism. This project combines the textual analysis of the protests’ coverage by two progovernment and two oppositional media with the analysis of their connections to the RuNet—a space that played an important role in the protests’ organization and coordination. The project aims to gain a deeper understanding of the role RuNet—a private space that increasingly becomes more public—plays in the development of Russian journalism.

This study employs polymedia theory to analyze how Iranian students use information communication technologies (ICTs) to sustain relationships with their homeland-based parents under extended separation caused by the Travel Ban or Muslim Ban. The study draws on in-depth interviews to analyze the impact of the Ban on child-parent relationships in the context of the following three consequences of polymedia: sociality, power distribution, and emotional expression. Findings reveal that prolonged separation combined with how students and parents use ICTs shift the established cultural norms. Students use ICTs to represent their personas selectively and practice ambient concealing. The reversed asymmetry in relational power distribution grants them greater relationship control. Students also actively engage in dialogues with their parents to compensate for their absence. This study extends the existing research by examining how cultural norms influence the use of ICTs in distance relationships, and by turning attention to political factors exacerbating family separation.

The crisis in Ukraine and the Russian annexation of Crimea negatively affected Russia’s image in the United States and in Western Europe. At the same time, the dynamic of the Russian–U.S. relations during the crisis prodded several prominent American right-wing politicians and commentators to make statements about Vladimir Putin that reflected their own ‘desire for a tough leader who will dispense with niceties and embrace power’. This article explores the phenomenon of Vladimir Putin’s ‘popularity’ among the American conservatives through qualitative textual analysis of the coverage of his persona in several right-wing publications and blogs. The project engages with the concept of ‘soft power’ by raising the following conceptual question: can a leader who ‘wrestles bears and drills for oil’ leverage these characteristics as a type of ‘soft power’ when it comes to ‘winning the hearts and minds’ of certain international constituencies and under particular international circumstances?