News

Junior Research Fellow of IGITI Alisa Maximova took part in a conference "Museums as Agents of Memory and Change", held on April 24-26 and organized by the Estonian National Museum and Department of Ethnology of the University of Tartu.

On April 15, 2019, Research Centre for Contemporary Culture organizes a special event "Manga as Literature, Manga as Reading" with the participation of Jaqueline Berndt (Professor of Japanese Language and Culture, Stockholm University), Yulia Magera (Senior Lecturer, Institute for Oriental and Classical Studies HSE), Natalia Samutina (Leading Researcher, Poletayev Institute for Theoretical and Historical Studies in the Humanities HSE) and Yulia Tarasuk (Leading Librarian, Curator of Comics Library at the Izmailovskaya City Library, Saint Petersburg).

In September, IGITI Research Centre for Contemporary Culture held a seminar ‘Analysing “informal” practices in (digital) cultural economies’. The talk was presented by Dr Ellen Rutten, Professor of Literature at the University of Amsterdam. See an interview with HSE News, in which Dr Rutten spoke about Sublime Imperfections project, her other current research work, and ongoing collaboration with HSE and IGITI.

Leading Research Fellow of IGITI Oksana Zaporozhets participated in a conference "Urban Activism and the Development of Civil Society in the Russian Federation", held on October 12-13 in Berlin.

At the invitation of the organizers Natalia Samutina participated in the international conference "Manga, Comics and Japan: Area Studies as Media Studies", which was held in Stockholm on September 6-8. The conference, organized by Professor Jaqueline Berndt, brought together contemporary researchers of manga from around the world. Natalia Samutina's presentation was devoted to the problems of interpreting manga in international readers' communities, including Russian-speaking communities, and was intended to emphasize the role of co-ownership cultures in the contemporary development of manga as a reading space. See the conference program and paper abstracts.

Vladislav Staf participated in the 5th annual conference of International Federation for Public History (IFPH), which took place on August 21-24 in the School of Arts, Sciences and Humanities of the University of Sao Paulo (EACH — USP), Sao Paulo, Brazil. Vladislav presented a paper "Gulag history in camp museums of the region of Perm: some narratives of human rights defenders and prison guards" in the "Difficult Heritage" session.

IGITI Leading Research Fellow and the head of the Research Centre for Contemporary Culture Natalia Samutina participated in the Fan Studies Network conference, held at the University of Cardiff on June 29-30, 2018. The Fan Studies Network unites researchers of fan cultures and participatory cultures from all over the world. Natalia Samutina presented a paper on transcultural manga communities in Russia. See the conference programme.

IGITI research fellows Boris Stepanov and Alexandra Kolesnik participated in a panel "Shaping Public History in Russia: Forms, Places and Media" at the second conference of the Italian Association of Public History. The conference took place in Pisa, on June 11-15.

Junior research fellow Alexandra Kolesnik took part in a conference ‘Hard Wired VI: So far, so good…so what? Approaching the Metal Realities’, which was held on May 3–5, 2018 at the University of Siegen (Germany). Alexandra presented a paper ‘Russian Heavy Metal Fandom and Post-Soviet Reality’. See the conference programme.

Natalia Samutina, the leading research fellow and Head of the Research Centre for Contemporary Culture at the National Research University Higher School of Economics, Moscow, Russia, has successfully finished teaching the first elective course on fan cultures and creative practices of online fan communities in a Russian university. The course has been attended by students from different faculties of Higher School of Economics and Moscow State University, as well as the lecturer’s colleagues who work in related research fields. The creation of this course has become possible thanks to the research project "Participatory Culture: Communities and Practices", and also thanks to cross-disciplinary productive atmosphere and organizational support of the Poletayev Institute for Theoretical and Historical Studies in the Humanities, Higher School of Economics. Next time this course is scheduled for January 2019. Below you can see the annotation and the literature for the course.