Periodit
(1.9.2009
– 16.10.2009)
(26.10.2009
– 11.12.2009)
(7.1.2010
– 5.3.2010)
(15.3.2010
– 14.5.2010)
Different approaches to Russia from the point of view of research: History, Culture and Literature, Sociology. Obligatory course for those who intend to make Russian Studies Programme.
The introduction course will address topics such as:
- An overview to the Russian history
- Periodisation of history in Russia and the Soviet Union
- Modernisation emphases of the state Mythmaking and propaganda in history
- Continuum in Soviet and Russian history
- Use of Past in the Soviet Union/Russia
- The legacy of the Soviet Union
- Key concepts of Russian cultural identity
- symbolic world of Russianness
- aspects of cultural history - cultural studies
- "New Man and Woman" - building a new Soviet man: kul'turnost'
- new Russian popular culture
- Russia's transition to a market economy, including the legacy of the Soviet economic system, the shadow economy and new forms of blat;
- Women in Russia, particularly their roles in business and the family
- Russia's transition to democracy, including presidential power, centralization and possibly state-media relations;
- How Russians have coped with the transition in daily life, for example facing changes in the workplace, economic insecurity and the growing gap between rich and poor (e.g. the "new Russians" versus the elderly poor).
Enrollment via NettiOpsu
No previous knowledge of the Russian language is required. The course is set around studying prepared texts, through which the main areas of the grammar will be covered. Active participation and production are the main goals of the course. The teaching language will be English. Students of any discipline are welcome. Those who already have knowledge of Russian language can participate courses at the Slavonic philology.
This course is for those who have never studied Russian before but think it would be a fun at least to try. The aim is to learn the Russian alphabet, to acquire fundamental vocabulary of 500-800 lexical units, to achieve basic skills in pronunciation and grammar, to study everyday communicative situations. This means that after studying Russian for one semester you will be able not only to read simple texts (names of the streets, signs, ads, short newspaper articles, etc.), but also to understand some spoken language, and even to communicate in everyday life situations.
Of course you heard many times, that Russian is a very difficult language with an alphabet nobody can learn, with lots of grammar forms nobody can understand, and hundreds of rules with thousands of exceptions nobody can remember. You have a chance to see for yourself whether is it true or maybe a slight exaggeration...
PLEASE NOTE:
Course book (available, for example, in the Juvenes book store after 15.08.2009): Karavanova N. B. (2008) Survival Russian: a Course in Conversational Russian. Moscow.
Enrollment via NettiOpsu
Lectures and exam (2 ECTS) + book exam (3 ECTS). In addition to the lectures, students can choose to take an exam on Sakwa, Richard (2008), Russian Politics and Society, London, Routledge (4th ed.)
Compensations:
IR KVPOS3,
ERS13
Bachelor of Social Sciences programme: KVPIB7A1 World Politics,
Russian Studies: RSTA4 Society and Politics.
The course focuses on Putinism as a distinct phenomenon of political ideology and practice.
The collapse of the Soviet Union has entailed a radical restructuring of the class system in Russia. Class is a central axis along which power and inequality are organized in society, which makes its analysis highly important. This course investigates the re-formation of class relations in contemporary Russia by approaching it from a variety of disciplinary, theoretical and methodological perspectives. It examines what social class means in Russia, how class relations have transformed historically, and how class intersects with other distinctions, such as gender and ethnicity. The primary focus is on examining the cultural and symbolic production of class, such as lifestyles, hierarchies of taste, habitus, and consumption patterns. The lectures analyse cultural representations of class and the ways in which class order is produced in various symbolic and everyday practices. In addition, class is also examined from a structural angle focusing on questions of redistribution and socio-economic inequalities. The course also critically reviews and problematizes Western theoretical discussions concerning class, in particular the concept of middle class.
Enrolment via NettiOpsu
For understanding any country it is the culture of childhood which is particularly significant. This course aims at providing the students with knowledge of the development of children's culture in XX-th century Russia (Pre-Soviet - Soviet - Post-Soviet) with its social values. The course concentrates on problematization of contradictions between ideological conceptions and real practices of education and upbringing in all three periods. Children's literature as a significant part of a Russian culture of socialization encodes the main values of the society - that's why it will be in the centre of the course. Lectures will be supported also by various pieces of evidence from Russian folklore, periodicals and movies.
Preliminary programme
- Brief history of childhood conceptions in the Russian history.
- Children's culture during the Russian "Silver Age".
- Soviet conceptions of childhood: ideas, slogans, institutions.
- Soviet youth communist organizations: "Oktyabr'ata" - "Pioneers" - "Young Communist Leage".
- Children Art in the USSR: directions and institutions.
- Children's writers in the USSR: servants of regime? escapists? secret dissidents?
- "High Literature for the smallest": key texts.
- Soviet children's cinema.
- Everyday life of Soviet children: 1920-1940.
- Everyday life of Soviet children: 1950-1980.
- Post-Soviet childhood and Post-Soviet children literature.
Enrolment via NettiOpsu
Luennot 18-20 t sekä suulliset esitykset ja niiden kommentointi 4-6 t.
Korvaa joko VALTA4 Setälän ja Gallagher - Laver - Mairin kirjat tai VALTS2 yhden 3 opintopisteen kirjan.
In this course television is treated as a medium that produces images of reality, representations of society as well of the "others", and transmits social norms and values. Studies of TV-texts give means of understanding shifts of cultural identity and trends in collective consciousness in Russia of the 2000s. Television remains important in the system of Russian social and cultural communication. In spite of growth of the Internet users' segment, television is still the most widespread and accessible medium. As a technology and a medium it defines modes of thinking and feeling, proposes ways of communicating on various levels. The culture of new media in Russia is being formed on a base of watching, understanding and criticizing TV.
The main goal of this course is to interpret television programs of different genres in order to reveal characteristic features of the recent Russian culture. It also aims to demonstrate methods of "reading" TV-messages - that is, semiotic analysis of verbal and visual TV-texts, study of narratives, and discourse analysis.
Topics of this course include:
- constructions of the reality in the news;
- popularity of infotainment;
- rhetoric of nation and nationalism in analytical programs;
- images of the society in "new Russian" series;
- representations of gender, age and ethnicity in talk-shows;
- constructions of subcultures on TV-screen;
- images of the past in documentaries;
- trash and glamour in TV-shows.
Enrolment via NettiOpsu
Enrollment via NettiOpsu
This course will examine the evolution of land use and attitudes towards resources and the landscape in Russia, in the context of Russia's social, economic, and political history. Such topics as demographic growth and population migration, the agricultural transformation of the steppe, the evolution of scientific and state forestry, and the effects of the Soviet regime on landscape and resources will be examined. One question we will explore is to what extent the Russian experience was unique and to what extent it was part of larger international trends. Required readings will be in English.
There will be a written examination at the end of the course.
The course is organized in cooperation with Aleksanteri Institute's Russian and East European Master's School.
Preliminary programme:
-Introduction. Geographical background. From Old Stone Age to the Rise of Muscovy.
-Muscovy to Imperial Russia. (17th-18th centuries)
-Imperial Visions and Realities. (19th century)
-Age of Industrialization and Revolution (1880s-1920s)
-The Stalin Model and the Environment (late 1920s-1930s)
-Postwar Soviet environmental history (1945-1965)
-"Developed Socialism" (1965-1985)
-Perestroika (1985-1991)
-El'tsin and Putin/Medvedev (1992-present)
-Final examination
Enrolment via NettiOpsu
Visual culture makes up a significant part of a particular national culture or civilisation and encodes the main values and attitudes of the people and state. For understanding Russia with her dramatic history this is particularly significant. The course aims at providing the students with knowledge of the Russian visual arts and contemporary visual environment with its semiotics and encoded social values.
Content of the course
Starting from the Russian icon and the 19th century painting, the course concentrates on Russian avant-garde art, the Soviet poster and Soviet/Russian art-photography with special attention to the following topics:
- The Russian avant-garde: in literature and in visual arts;
- The history of the Soviet poster;
- Photography and propaganda;
- Gender in Russian painting, poster and photography;
- Censorship in visual arts under Stalin;
- Famous Russian war photographs and photographers;
- Socialist realism in the visual arts (1950s-1980s);
- The re-emergence of fine-art photography in the 1970s;
- Outstanding contemporary Russian photographers.
The final part of the course deals with the Post-modernist 'visual quotation' in Russian pop-culture.
The course is organized in cooperation with Aleksanteri Institute's Russian and East European Master's School.
Enrolment via NettiOpsu