Russian Media, Culture and Society

Russian Media, Culture and Society

Sergey Erofeev

This series of cultural journeys will take you from music to film, from image to pop culture and from broadcasting to the heights of Russian modernism and postmodernism. Attention will also be paid to the phenomenon of St. Petersburg as Russian ‘cultural capital’. The thematic breakdown is based on anticipated prior basic acquaintance of the disciplinarily heterogeneous audience with one or more of the following fields: history, sociology, anthropology, political science, art history, and media and cultural studies.

The two main objectives of the course are:

(1) to provide an overview of the development of Russian ideology, media and cultural institutions, and their interplay with wider social and economic developments while addressing the sociological theories of culture and cultural modernization;

(2) to introduce an interdisciplinary approach to cultural analysis to students who will learn how to apply it to the study of contemporary Russian ideology and culture as well as to ‘high’ and ‘popular’ cultural industries in Russia and their relation to post-Soviet Eurasian and international realities.