Stephen C Hutching
Biographic Data
| ID | 941799 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Stephen C Hutching |
| GIVEN NAMES | Stephen C |
| FAMILY NAME | Hutching |
| SIGNATURE | HUTCHING S C |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Manchester |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-2086-3244 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 52 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 111 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 52 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1990 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
Deep State Conspiracism and/as Disinformation: A Journey to the Heart of Democracy’s Truth Crisis
This article explores deep state (DS) conspiracism’s ambiguous relationship with disinformation. Applying cross-cultural discourse analysis and genealogical methods to the divergent valorizations of DS narratives, the study shows how they portray it variously as disinformation, misinformation, sinister actuality, mythological truth, and conceptual tool, arguing this inconsistency impels us to relocate disinformation from a universalist realm of f…
Disinformation as process: Modeling the lifecycle of deceit
This article offers a new conceptual model of disinformation which accounts for the performative status of disinformation accusations, and the dialogistic interaction between accusers and accused, within a multi-aspectual dynamic process involving diverse actors (including those disassociated from various forms of deceit). The model shows how claims acquire or lose their disinformation status, as they transgress temporal, geopolitical, and lingua…
Uncovering the uncoverers: Identity, Performativity and Representation in Counter-Disinformation Discourse
Treating counter-disinformation activities as a discursive practice producing knowledge in specific cultural and historical contexts, this article brings a vital cultural studies perspective to an incipient Critical Disinformation Studies agenda. At the same time, it cautions against inadvertently aligning that agenda with the ‘bad faith’, right-wing populist critique of counter-disinformation practices, acknowledging their genuine potential to e…
Truth with a Z: Disinformation, war in Ukraine, and Russia’s contradictory discourse of imperial identity
This article offers a qualitative analysis of how, by adopting identity-related discourses whose meanings resonate within a given culture, Russian state propaganda strives to bolster “the truth status” of its Ukraine war claims. These discourses, we argue, have long historical lineages and thus are expected to be familiar to audiences. We identify three such discourses common in many contexts but with specific resonances in Russia, those of colon…
Mediatization and journalistic agency: Russian television coverage of the Skripal poisonings
The 2018 Skripal poisonings prompted the heavy securitisation of UK-Russian relations. Despite the ensuing tight coordination between the Russian government and state-aligned television, this article argues that in today’s mediatised environment – in which social and political activities fuse inextricably with their own mediation – even non-democracies must cope with the shaping of global communications by media logics and related market imperati…
Modern Languages and/as Area Studies: Towards a New Humanities or Path to Oblivion
There is an ambivalence regarding the traditional disciplinary affiliation of Modern Languages, split between Area Studies, with its orientation to the social sciences, and an arts wing aligned with literary and cultural studies. The Area Studies contingent has itself been hampered by its struggle to convince social scientists that linguistic expertise is anything more than a practical tool enabling them to extend their research agendas to non-En…
Revolution from the margins: Commemorating 1917 and RT’s scandalising of the established order
In this article, I explore what RT’s unusually open-ended project commemorating the centenary of the Russian Revolution - #1917Live – tells us about its tendentious, mainstream output. I adopt an epistemological framework locating meaning in the marginal and different rather than the normative and recurrent, treating this ‘un-RT like’ project’s components as multi-layered cultural texts to be interpreted rather than sociological data to be counte…
A home from home: Recursive nationhood, the 2015 STS television serial, Londongrad , and post-soviet stiob
Drawing on the mathematical concept of recursion as the repeated application of a single function to an initial element in a succession capable of indefinite extension, the article develops a recursive nationhood framework to capture the ongoing, mutual production of nationhood by the transnational, and nation by nation, in an extendable series of self-renewing repetitions which mirror and transform one another. Arguing that the framework has par…
Fake news and ‘post truth’: Some preliminary notes
The following does not purport to be anything resembling an essay, or even a set of fundamental principles, relating to the now viral phenomenon of ‘fake news’ and the umbrella term ‘post-truth’ to
(Un)covering alterity
This chapter examines the initially subdued role of ethnicity in television&s;s approach to consensus management as it struggled to negotiate the competing demands of the democratic and nationalist oppositions. Ethnicity&s;s centrality to the hegemonic process is indicated by the subliminal manner in which it colours the corruption theme so ubiquitous in Russian political discourse. The chapter examines the role of Naval&s;nyi&s;s own populist ca…
Transcending marginality
This chapter focuses on how challenges have been manifested, on why such a development might occur and on what it tells about the relationship between the Kremlin and federal broadcasters, through the prism of television coverage of migration issues. The selection of officials and experts is such that only a minority of the speakers support the Kremlin-endorsed position, namely, that migration is essential for the country&s;s economy and that int…
Mapping an uncertain terrain
This chapter focuses the television&s;s ability to perform state television&s;s balancing act was tested severely during the ethno-racially motivated riots in Moscow in December 2010. In addition to Channel 1 and Rossiia, the author analyse relevant news reports by NTV and REN TV. Conflicting information about the Manezhnaia disturbances was refracted by the four channels through a set of consistently utilized interpretative lenses reflecting off…
An unholy scandal
The scandal took place on the eve of the presidential elections, and in the context of the liberal opposition&s;s criticism of the Moscow Patriarchate for offering its overt support to Putin. Prime among the discursive displacements from the Pussy Riot scandal was the paranoid vitriol launched by the Orthodox Church and the hyperbolic professions of piety. The Moscow Times singled out from among the prosecution&s;s far-fetched accusations the cha…
Ethnic conflict and television news coverage of the December 2010 Moscow riots
This chapter analyses the broader historical and current political context of the region within which Vesti-Buriatiia&s;s coverage. It explores the representational strategies with which Vesti-Buriatiia deals with the republic&s;s actual and symbolic borderland position and negotiates its cultural and religious diversity. The author attempts to make sense of the complex balancing act by analysing Vesti-Buriatiia&s;s broadcasts through the perspec…
Re-working Russian diversity
The scandal took place on the eve of the presidential elections, and in the context of the liberal opposition&s;s criticism of the Moscow Patriarchate for offering its overt support to Putin. Prime among the discursive displacements from the Pussy Riot scandal was the paranoid vitriol launched by the Orthodox Church and the hyperbolic professions of piety. The Moscow Times singled out from among the prosecution&s;s far-fetched accusations the cha…
Television and nationhood
In this chapter the author presents an overview of the body of news recordings that people collected over a two-year period from September 2010 to August 2012. From news recordings the author generated a simple content analysis which enabled, to gain a grasp of the broad patterns and trends in coverage of inter-ethnic relations in Russia, to map out the contested and shifting terrain. In presenting the content analysis, the author begins by asses…
Conclusion
National television serves as a key facilitator of the process, both aspects of which were epitomized in Mamontov&s;s Spetsial&s;nyi korrespondent series on Pussy Riot and migrant workers respectively. The symbiosis of national self and antithetical western &s;other&s; in the Russian patriotic imagination, and the fragile condition in which free expression, and with it the future of Russian civil society, and of the Federation, finds itself place…
‘There is war on our streets…’
This chapter focuses on how challenges have been manifested, on why such a development might occur and on what it tells about the relationship between the Kremlin and federal broadcasters, through the prism of television coverage of migration issues. The selection of officials and experts is such that only a minority of the speakers support the Kremlin-endorsed position, namely, that migration is essential for the country&s;s economy and that int…
Re-inventing Russia in television news commemorations of the ‘Day of National Unity’
This chapter talks about the wake of Manezhnaia revealed, television&s;s role in the mis-management of diversity policy is far from restricted to news bulletins. The new generation of gypsy dramas to flood Russian television can also be traced to the early 1990s arrival on post-Soviet screens of the Latin American &s;soap opera&s; form, with its melodramatic narratives of provincial girls finding love and social advancement in new, urban environm…
Nation, Ethnicity and Race on Russian Television: Mediating Post-Soviet Difference
Russia, one of the most ethno-culturally diverse countries in the world, provides a rich case study on how globalisation and associated international trends are disrupting, and causing the radical rethinking of approaches to, inter-ethnic cohesion. The book highlights the importance of television broadcasting in shaping national discourse and the place of ethno-cultural diversity within it. It argues that television’s role here has been reinforce…
Race and ethnicity in the Russian media: Rights, responsibilities and representations’, Public debate, The Frontline Club, London, Thursday 18 October 2012
The gypsy as vanishing mediator in Russian television coverage of interethnic tension
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 apply…
Serializing National Cohesion: Channel 1's “Shkola” and the Contradictions of Post‐Soviet “Consensus Management”
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, br…
Islam, Security and Television News
Focusing on British, French and Russian television news coverage of Islam as a security threat, this book provides the first comparative account of how television broadcasting in different geo- and so
Fault Lines in Russia's Discourse of Nation: Television Coverage of the December 2010 Moscow Riots
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…
Nation, Ethnicity and Race on Russian Television: Mediating Post-Soviet Difference
Russia, one of the most ethno-culturally diverse countries in the world, provides a rich case study on how globalisation and associated international trends are disrupting, and causing the radical rethinking of approaches to, inter-ethnic cohesion. The book highlights the importance of television broadcasting in shaping national discourse and the place of ethno-cultural diversity within it. It argues that television’s role here has been reinforce…
Truth with a Z: Disinformation, war in Ukraine, and Russia’s contradictory discourse of imperial identity
This article offers a qualitative analysis of how, by adopting identity-related discourses whose meanings resonate within a given culture, Russian state propaganda strives to bolster “the truth status” of its Ukraine war claims. These discourses, we argue, have long historical lineages and thus are expected to be familiar to audiences. We identify three such discourses common in many contexts but with specific resonances in Russia, those of colon…
Television and Culture in Putin's Russia: Remote Control
This book examines television culture in Russia under the government of Vladimir Putin. In recent years, the growing influx into Russian television of globally mediated genres and formats has coincided with a decline in media freedom and a ratcheting up of government control over the content style of television programmes. All three national channels (First, Russia, NTV) have fallen victim to Putin’s power-obsessed regime. Journalists critical of…
After the Future: The Paradoxes of Postmodernism and Contemporary Russian Culture
Fault Lines in Russia's Discourse of Nation: Television Coverage of the December 2010 Moscow Riots
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…
Between Impartiality and Ideology: The BBC's paradoxical remit and the case of Islam-related television news
This article examines the paradoxical requirements of the BBC's public service broadcasting (PSB) remit, which prescribes impartiality, fairness and balance in news reporting but also requires the broadcaster to serve specified civic values deemed fundamental to British society. Since this combination of civic values is not ideologically neutral, it raises the question of how liberal ideological assumptions are communicated in news items purporti…
Television, Nation Building and the Everyday in Contemporary Russia
Additional informationNotes on contributorsStephen HutchingsStephen Hutchings is a professor in the Department of Russian and East European Studies at the University of Manchester, UK ([email protected]).Galina MiazhevichGalina Miazhevich is a Gorbachev Media Research Fellow in the Rothermere American Institute at the University of Oxford, UK ([email protected])
Disinformation as process: Modeling the lifecycle of deceit
This article offers a new conceptual model of disinformation which accounts for the performative status of disinformation accusations, and the dialogistic interaction between accusers and accused, within a multi-aspectual dynamic process involving diverse actors (including those disassociated from various forms of deceit). The model shows how claims acquire or lose their disinformation status, as they transgress temporal, geopolitical, and lingua…
Modern Languages and/as Area Studies: Towards a New Humanities or Path to Oblivion
There is an ambivalence regarding the traditional disciplinary affiliation of Modern Languages, split between Area Studies, with its orientation to the social sciences, and an arts wing aligned with literary and cultural studies. The Area Studies contingent has itself been hampered by its struggle to convince social scientists that linguistic expertise is anything more than a practical tool enabling them to extend their research agendas to non-En…
A home from home: Recursive nationhood, the 2015 STS television serial, Londongrad , and post-soviet stiob
Drawing on the mathematical concept of recursion as the repeated application of a single function to an initial element in a succession capable of indefinite extension, the article develops a recursive nationhood framework to capture the ongoing, mutual production of nationhood by the transnational, and nation by nation, in an extendable series of self-renewing repetitions which mirror and transform one another. Arguing that the framework has par…
Fake news and ‘post truth’: Some preliminary notes
The following does not purport to be anything resembling an essay, or even a set of fundamental principles, relating to the now viral phenomenon of ‘fake news’ and the umbrella term ‘post-truth’ to
Saint Petersburg 300: Television and the Invention of a Russian (Media) Tradition
Focusing on the televising of Saint Petersburg's 300th anniversary, this article elucidates, and ultimately complicates, the notion of Russian media complicity in a state-led national identity mission in which the city's mythology is used to (re)integrate prerevolutionary imperial tradition with Soviet ritual and Western ideology. It draws on Dayan and Katz's notion of media event and on Bakhtin's concepts of chronotope and carnival that facilita…
Framing, Time-Shifts and Mirrors in Brjusov's Ognennyj Angel
Writings on Literature
Russian Folk Belief
Universe of the Mind: A Semiotic Theory of Culture
La Letteratura Russa Del Novocento: Problemi di Poetica
A Semiotic Analysis of the Short Stories of Leonid Andreev 1900-1909
This thesis applies the techniques of semiotic analysis to a selection of short stories by Leonid Andreyev in an attempt to offer one answer to the problems of categorising Andreyev's unique art and placing it within a literary-evolutionary perspective. The semiotic method was chosen because of its ability both to assimilate literary texts to the supra-individual processes with which it works, and at the same time to delineate an author's particu…
A Semiotic Analysis of the Short Stories of Leonid Andreev, 1900-1909
Breaking the Circle of the Self: Domestication, Alienation and the Question of Discourse Type in Rozanov's Late Writings
It is often the mark of a writer's sophistication and innovative powers that certain of his/her key works present difficulties in the area of genre. Pushkin's Evgenii Onegin, Dostoevskii's Diary of a Writer, Tolstoi's War and Peace and Belyi's Kotik Letaev serve as instructive examples from Russian literature. To this list one could certainly add the late writings of Vasilii Rozanov. The genre of Rozanov's trilogy Solitaria, Fallen Leaves and Apo…
Jakobsonian Poetics and Slavic Narrative: From Pushkin to Solzhenitsyn
After the Future: The Paradoxes of Postmodernism and Contemporary Russian Culture
Russian Modernism: The Transfiguration of the Everyday
This book explores the unique way in which Russian culture constructs the notion of everyday life, or byt, and offers the first unified reading of Silver-age narrative which it repositions at the centre of Russian modernism. Drawing on semiotics and theology, Stephen C. Hutchings argues that byt emerged from a dialogue between two traditions, one reflected in western representational aesthetics for which daily existence figures as neutral and nor…
Letters and Other Materials from the Moscow and Prague Linguistic Circles, 1912-1945
Russian Modernism: The Transfiguration of the Everyday
Making Sense of the Sensual in Pavel Florenskii's Aesthetics: The Dialectics of Finite Being
A boundary is not that at which something stops, but...that from which something begins its presencing.-Martin Heidegger,Poetry, Language, ThoughtPersonhood is a living contradiction-between private and social, form and content, finite and infinite, freedom and fate. Personhood would be lost if the boundaries and the forms that contain it were to disappear, if it were to dissolve into cosmic infinity. But personhood would not be the image and lik…
Photographic Eye as Poetic I: Maiakovskii's and Rodchenko's Pro eto project (1923)
Early in Dostoevskii's The Idiot, the hero is transfixed by a photoportrait of Nastasia Filippovna, whose face is to haunt him thereafter: ‘On the portrait a woman of truly unusual beauty was represented. She was photographed in a black silk dress ... her eyes were dark and deepset, her brow pensive’.1 The face, as we later learn, bears the imprint of a knowledge too terrible to contemplate, knowledge of the tragic end to Nastasia's own life; and…
Ghosts in the machine: Literature as translation mechanism in post-Soviet televisual representations of western-ness
This article examines how Russian television's recent assimilation of western genres to its own cultural paradigms has influenced the development of a post-Soviet identity. Informed by W.J.T. Mitchell's theory of the importance of word—image thresholds, and by Iurii Lotman's conception of intercultural dialogue, it is based on light entertainment broadcasts recorded over the period 1999—2001 on the NTV channel. It argues that Russia's traditional…
Russian Literary Culture in the Camera Age: The Word As Image
This book explores how one of the world's most literary-oriented societies entered the modern visual era, beginning with the advent of photography in the nineteenth century, focusing then on literature's role in helping to shape cinema as a tool of official totalitarian culture during the Soviet period, and concluding with an examination of post-Soviet Russia's encounter with global television. As well as pioneering the exploration of this import…
Russian Literary Culture in the Camera Age: The Word as Image
Russian and Soviet Film Adaptations of Literature, 1900-2001: Screening the Word
Saint Petersburg 300: Television and the Invention of a Russian (Media) Tradition
Focusing on the televising of Saint Petersburg's 300th anniversary, this article elucidates, and ultimately complicates, the notion of Russian media complicity in a state-led national identity mission in which the city's mythology is used to (re)integrate prerevolutionary imperial tradition with Soviet ritual and Western ideology. It draws on Dayan and Katz's notion of media event and on Bakhtin's concepts of chronotope and carnival that facilita…
Impact of “Islamic Extremism” on TV News Representations of Multiculturalism, Intégration and Mnogonarodnost’: A Comparative Analysis
This article examines how television in the United Kingdom, France and Russia has managed shifts in consensus resulting from the recent rise of “Islamic extremism.” The research is based on recordings from news bulletins on “Establishment” channels (BBC1, France 2, 1st Channel). We conclude that hybridity in multiculturalist discourse is highest within the BBC, where a robust “hegemonic chain” has facilitated representation of the widest range of…
The Polonium trail to Islam: Litvinenko, liminality, and television's (cold) war on terror
This article examines how Aleksandr Litvinenko's death links the ‘war on terror’ with an emergent New Cold War. Based on an analysis of BBC and Russian Channel 1 news bulletins, it highlights the centrality of the post-imperial legacy of the two sides in the dispute to the manner of its unfolding, and to how war on terror discourse reconstructs national identities and international antagonisms. It draws on narratology to account for Litvinenko's …
Television and Culture in Putin's Russia: Remote Control
This book examines television culture in Russia under the government of Vladimir Putin. In recent years, the growing influx into Russian television of globally mediated genres and formats has coincided with a decline in media freedom and a ratcheting up of government control over the content style of television programmes. All three national channels (First, Russia, NTV) have fallen victim to Putin’s power-obsessed regime. Journalists critical of…
Comparing Russian, French and British Television News Commemorations of 9/11: Terror, Everyday Nation Building and the Struggle for the Universal
This article broaches the need of television-led nation building projects to frame the traumatic with the everyday, and to map that process onto the ongoing renegotiation of the relationship between the particular and national on one hand, and the transnational and universal on the other. Nowhere is this mapping more vividly revealed than in national mediations of 9/11 anniversaries. In their approach to 9/11 anniversaries, broadcasters convey th…
Television, Nation Building and the Everyday in Contemporary Russia
Additional informationNotes on contributorsStephen HutchingsStephen Hutchings is a professor in the Department of Russian and East European Studies at the University of Manchester, UK ([email protected]).Galina MiazhevichGalina Miazhevich is a Gorbachev Media Research Fellow in the Rothermere American Institute at the University of Oxford, UK ([email protected])
Political science (28 works) · Philosophy (23 works) · Art (22 works) · Sociology (22 works) · Law (20 works) · History (19 works) · Law (18 works) · Media studies (17 works) · Aesthetics (15 works) · Linguistics (14 works)