Olga Baysha

Olga Baysha
National Research University Higher School of Economics | HSE

PhD

About

52
Publications
6,704
Reads
How we measure 'reads'
A 'read' is counted each time someone views a publication summary (such as the title, abstract, and list of authors), clicks on a figure, or views or downloads the full-text. Learn more
253
Citations
Introduction
I earned my MS in Journalism from Colorado State University and PhD in Communication from the University of Colorado at Boulder. Previously, I worked as a news reporter and editor in Kharkiv, Ukraine, then as an editor-in-chief of a documentary production company in Kyiv, Ukraine. My current research interests: Discourse theory; the discourses of neoliberalization / modernization / civilization; neoliberal populism; populism and the integral reality of global social networks.

Publications

Publications (52)
Article
Full-text available
Many critical scholars hold that the new Cold War is already more dangerous than its predecessor, partly due to the synergy of Western intelligence services and various hegemonic-ideological institutions—the Censorship-Industrial Complex—in demonizing Russia. This paper is one of the first efforts to empirically measure how pervasive that discourse...
Chapter
As is evident from statistical data, a worldwide collapse of positive attitudes toward Russia occurred in 2014—the year Russia annexed Crimea and supported rebels in eastern Ukraine who allegedly shot down the passenger plane MH17 using the Russian Buk missile system. As this chapter argues, an understanding of what happened in Ukraine in 2013–14 a...
Article
Full-text available
Drawing on the ideas of Laclau and Mouffe (1985) and Carpentier (2017), this paper shows how, on the one hand, discursive-material assemblages within the digital environment of interconnected information networks prevent the possibility of final discursive closures, while, on the other hand, they may weaken discourses, preventing them from serving...
Article
Full-text available
Drawing on the ideas of Laclau and Mouffe (1985) and Carpentier (2017), this paper shows how, on the one hand, discursive-material assemblages within the digital environment of interconnected information networks prevent the possibility of final discursive closures, while, on the other hand, they may weaken discourses, preventing them from servi...
Book
Full-text available
Опираясь на теорию дискурса Эрнесто Лаклау и Шанталь Муфф, дальнейшее ее развитие в трудах этих ученых и в разработках Нико Карпентье по социальным антагонизмам, автор рассматривает украинский Евромайдан как дискурсивную формацию, определяющую социальные смыслы. Приведенный в книге дискурсивный анализ показывает, насколько важно признать и осмыслит...
Chapter
Full-text available
Employing Ernesto Laclau’s theory of populism, this paper analyses the populist discourse of the Euromaidan, a Ukrainian movement for European integration. Articulating their democratic demands equivalentially, Euromaidan leaders and activists brought to the field of Ukraine’s discursivity the impossible totality of “the Ukrainian people” fighting...
Chapter
This chapter discusses how Ukrainian politicians have been exploiting conspiratorial populist discourses to instigate public fears and shift attention from the internal dimensions of Ukrainian problems to external ones. The case study discussed is the Odessa tragedy that happened on May 2, 2014, when forty-eight people died as a result of street cl...
Article
Full-text available
Many CDA scholars assume there is an inherent opposition between democratization with its advances toward social justice and neoliberal marketization with its array of negative consequences. Analyzing the discourse of democratization in the context of contemporary Ukraine, this paper argues that the issue is more complicated. Neoliberal marketizati...
Chapter
Drawing on the discourse theory of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe (1985), this chapter discusses how the popular memes ‘jumper’, ‘kolorad,’ ‘maidown,’ ‘panhead’, ‘sovok’, ‘and vatnik’, which had been created or activated during the Euromaidan revolution in Ukraine, contributed to the intensification of its internal social conflict. To analyze ho...
Article
Full-text available
It has been argued that by allowing users to unfriend, unfollow, and block political and cultural ‘others,’ Facebook facilitates the discouragement of dialog between those holding different views on political issues. Using a case study of a civil confrontation in Ukraine, the paper analyzes the reasons for unfriending political ‘others’ reported by...
Book
Exploring the ways in which language and conflict are intertwined and interrelated, this volume examines the patterns of public discourse in Ukraine and Russia since the beginning of the Ukrainian Crisis in 2014. It investigates the trends in language aggression, evaluation, persuasion and other elements of conflict communication related to the sit...
Article
Full-text available
In his recent book The Discursive-Material Knot, [Carpentier, N. (2017). The discursive-material Knot: Cyprus in conflict and community media participation. New York: Peter Lang]. Nico Carpentier identifies three nodal points of antagonistic discourse: the need for destruction of the enemy, homogenization of the self as opposed to the enemy, and th...
Book
Full-text available
Miscommunicating Social Change analyzes the discourses of three social movements and the alternative media associated with them, revealing that the Enlightenment narrative, though widely critiqued in academia, remains the dominant way of conceptualizing social change in the name of democratization in the post-Soviet terrain. The main argument of th...
Article
Full-text available
The discourse of terrorism divides the world into sharp dichotomies of ‘free’ and ‘civilized’ states vs. ‘evil’ and ‘barbarian terrorists. More often than not, this divisive assumption goes unquestioned in public speeches by politicians, media reports, and public deliberation on the issues related to the phenomenon of ‘terror’. It becomes problemat...
Article
Full-text available
Drawing on Ernesto Laclau’s theory of articulation, this article analyzes Barack Obama’s and Vladimir Putin’s public speeches on the Ukrainian crisis of 2014. The article discusses how the presidents constructed rival discourses by erasing the nuances of complex tensions between the logics of equivalence and difference existing within the Ukrainian...
Article
Full-text available
This article analyzes how the ‘progressive’ imagination of democratically minded intellectuals in Russia discursively produces the internal ‘other’ – Vladimir Putin’s supporters – as a singular monolithic subject whose ‘underdeveloped’ intellectual condition is judged against an imagined scale of human progression. Discussing the case study of a Ru...
Chapter
Full-text available
The demonstrations for European integration began in Kyiv on November 21, 2013, after a popular journalist Mustafa Nayem called Ukrainians to gather at the Maidan. Nayem worked for Ukrainian Pravda (UP), a political web site that served as an important mobilization resource for protesters during both the “Orange Revolution” of 2004 and the “Revolut...
Article
Full-text available
Although criticism of Enlightenment ideas has become widespread within academic circles, the basic Enlightenment narrative – an inexorable movement to a progressive condition – remains a dominant assumption within the discourses of modernization and democratization. This article analyzes how the ‘progressive’ imagination of Euromaidan protesters in...
Book
The purpose of The Mythologies of Capitalism and the End of the Soviet Project is to show that in order to understand popular disillusionment with democratization, liberalization, and other transformations associated with the attempts of non-Western societies to appropriate the ideas of Western modernity, one must consider how these ideas are mytho...
Article
Full-text available
This article argues that we need to be more cautious with the dichotomy between “corporate” and “alternative” media widely accepted within critical media studies. This division can be misleading, especially if applied to non-Western societies. I explicate my argument using the case study of the Russian alternative radio station, Echo of Moscow, and...
Chapter
This chapter will discuss the role of journalists in forming a global culture of responsibility by presenting a case study on how Ukrainian reporters perceive their cosmopolitan ‘duty’. The chapter will show that, contrary to the normative expectations of many Western theorists, non-Western journalists may remain indifferent to global problems just...
Article
Stakeholder negotiation processes are increasingly used in environmental management, but are often difficult due to values differences among stakeholders. These values can be reflected in the language used by stakeholders, which may lead to conflict in negotiation processes. This study investigated whether there are widespread differences among Col...
Article
Full-text available
It is widely assumed nowadays that in order to effectively respond to environmental challenges, humanity must cultivate cosmopolitan ethical consciousness. An important role, according to this outlook, should be assigned to journalists, who must possess a cosmopolitan sense of responsibility. How can this global responsibility emerge out of the loc...
Article
Full-text available
Political communication is often depicted as an exchange of rational arguments between rational individuals. However, in political communication people not only communicate emotionally but also rely on nonrational understandings drawn from mythical representations of various symbols and images. The problem becomes especially acute in the realm of g...
Article
Full-text available
The term “politics of fear” implies that political elites manipulate people’s anxieties intentionally, for political reasons. This study investigates how the image of frightening Russia has been maintained by the New York Times since the collapse of the USSR. The study focuses on the nuclear dialogue between Moscow and Washington. Starting from Dec...
Article
Full-text available
It has been argued that the advent of transnational media technologies leads to the formation of a global public sphere. By means of framing analysis, this article examines whether signs of global public deliberation were present in American and Ukrainian media coverage of the Russia-Georgia military conflict of 2008. To embrace the range of ideas...
Article
This study investigates one such case study – the outburst of anti-Americanism among Russia Internet users during the Russia-Georgia military crisis of 2008. The paper analyzes the discussions of Washington Post articles at the Washington Post Internet forum and the Foreign Media Russian Internet site. The study shows that, despite numerous attempt...
Article
Full-text available
This paper examines how selected Ukrainian news media—three television channels, one newspaper, and one Internet site—framed the nation's political crisis of 2000–2001. Dominant media frames and framing devices were identified through content analysis of 829 news stories. Frames were compared across these news outlets as well as across different ti...
Article
Communication of politically divisive concepts is important to consider when evaluating the trend towards increased participatory environmental policymaking. Research focusing on communication among stakeholders is vital to help understand the role that message and meaning play in policymaking. Externally imposed meaning can be especially powerful...

Network

Cited By