Case Of Russia Research Articles

Тренды «инклюзивного образования» в современном мире: международные дискуссии и перспективы для России

<p>The article examines the trends in the development of the concept of "inclusive education" in the documents of international organizations, discussions in academic publications regarding this concept, its evolution and implementation. The prospects for the implementation of the highlighted trends in Russian education in the current socio-political context of Russia and taking into account the discourses of contextualization and decolonization of the concept of inclusive education are discussed. The contradictions between the global trends of inclusive education and the situation of development of Russian education and the state are revealed. The interpretations of the Russian case of the development of inclusive education are proposed as an example of the implementation of a global concept promoted by international organizations in specific socio-cultural and institutional conditions.</p>

Процессы идиоматизации, происходящие при переходе от жестовых номинаций к жестовым фразеологизмам

The paper deals with gesture names and gesture idioms, analysing idiomatisation that occurs as the names become figurative units. Building explanatory models in line with seman-tic typology, the paper studies cases in Russian, English, French, and Spanish to find similari-ties and differences in semantic derivation of gesture names. The study owes its relevance to the significant involvement of gesture names and idioms in oral discourse, as it adds new data for explanatory models and semantic typology.

A Study of Russian-Belarusian Border Dialects: The Use of the Genitive Case Ending -u in the Khislavichi Dialect

Summary This article explores the features of noun declension in the Khislavichi dialect, focusing on the use of the genitive case ending -u. The study is based on data from the Khislavichi Corpus, which consists of texts recorded from native speakers in the western part of the Khislavichi district of the Smolensk Region during field trips in 2018–2019. The linguistic situation in this area is characterized by the Russification of genetically Belarusian dialects. The analysis examines the preservation of dialect features, the historical and contemporary usage of the genitive case in Russian and Belarusian, and the specificities of the genitive ending -u in the Khislavichi dialect. The findings indicate that the Khislavichi dialect employs the -u ending in the genitive case for a larger number of lexemes compared to standard Russian. This raises the question of whether these "extra" -u forms can be linked to the previous Belarusian system. The study explores the variability found in the usage of both the -u and -a endings, suggesting that their selection may be contingent upon the intended meaning and the age of the speaker. Additionally, the article contributes to the development of a broader theoretical problem: the transition from one idiom to another, and ultimately the theory of language change. This research adds to our understanding of dialectal variation and the mechanisms of language change, particularly in regions experiencing language contact and assimilation processes.

Listening comprehension in a home language: a case of Russian in Germany.

Listening comprehension is central to language learning, yet it remains the least understood and least researched skill. This statement is still relevant today, as there is insufficient research to explore listening comprehension from the perspective of family-related multilingualism and to consider the complete linguistic repertoire of multilingual speakers. Moreover, with regard to home language, listening comprehension is assumed to be a more developed language competence than reading or writing. Based on the mentioned research, the aim of the present study is to investigate listening comprehension and its influencing factors specifically in German-Russian simultaneous bilinguals aged 13-19 (n = 99) by considering the home- and majority language. The study uses quantitative data collection methods such as linguistic tests in Russian and German for the elicitation in different levels of listening and questionnaires for strategy use and background. The research questions are as follows: What does the language proficiency and input in Russian look like? (1) Regarding listening comprehension in Russian as a home language, are there differences between the speakers within comprehension on different levels, e.g., is sound decoding easier than sentence parsing? (2) If there are differences in Russian as a home language, which linguistic and background variables can correlate with the performance of listening comprehension on its different levels? Concerning the first research question, the results show relevant differences between four different levels of listening comprehension (phoneme, word, sentence, and text level), which strengthened the assumed complexity of listening comprehension in the home language. In addition, the results show different connections between the listening comprehension competence and the input from different family members, as well as exposure to film and television in the home and majority language.

The threat of Russia's force in Ukraine

ABSTRACT In December 2021, Russia's military build-up near Ukraine, accompanied by explicit denials of any plans for an incursion, presents a significant case study on hidden threats of force. The Russian Representative to the United Nations argued that positioning military forces within its sovereign territory was a domestic matter and not a threat-an argument supported by China and uncontested by a few other member states (India, Ghana and Belarus). Such representations were presented despite the strong evidence of an impending invasion, including troop deployments along the Ukrainian border, strategic use of locations (such as Belarus) and medical personnel involvement. This case study raises important legal questions: how can threats of force, which violate the prohibition in Article 2(4) of the UN Charter, be more clearly identified? Furthermore, how can the international community improve its ability to censure such disguised or denied threats, as in Russia's case?

Mastering the Russian case: Learning challenges, current textbook approaches, and new perspectives

Mastering the Russian case: Learning challenges, current textbook approaches, and new perspectives

Others as Security Threats: Securitizing Discourses, Social Magic, and the Bureaucratic Field

For over 20 years, there has been an ongoing debate about what is primary in the process of securitization—discourses or practices. Traditional research on securitization tends to analyze discourses and practices separately, which can be seen even in studies that attempt to combine these two approaches. In this context, the concept “discourses” refers to a wide range of public political statements, while the concept “practices” mainly refers to the strategies of security professionals. I argue that, in order to gain a better understanding of securitization processes, the research focus should be narrowed to first-order securitizing performatives and the related securitizing practices. This approach will highlight political statements that can genuinely alter social reality, bridge the gap between discourses and practices, facilitate the analysis of institutional mechanisms of securitization, and help obtain much new relevant empirical material. The potential benefits of the proposed approach are illustrated through the analysis of two cases: the Italian case and the Russian case. For the Italian case, the analysis includes declarations of states of emergency related to the exacerbation of the “nomad issue.” For the Russian case, it examines legal acts stipulating the official recognition of migrants as prone to terrorism.

Imperism as political nomos in Russia and beyond

ABSTRACT This article proposes the concept of ‘imperism’ as an analytical tool apt to describe political processes in Putin’s Russia and beyond. Imperism denotes an ontological orientation, or nomos (the term derives from theories of religion and politics by Berger and Schmitt), that undergirds a plurality of civic positions, informs policy, and fundamentally casts imperialness as a political entity’s normal, desirable state. Russia’s imperist nomos shall be explored in its key dimensions, including cosmology, authority, sociology, and aesthetics. However, imperism’s analytical purchase is not limited to the Russian case. In particular, this paper considers the merits of this category vis-à-vis an array of related but distinct concepts: imperialism, authoritarianism, fascism, nationalism, and irredentism. On those grounds, it will be argued that Putinist Russia’s military adventurism manifests a peculiar, imperist form of imperialism; that the Putin regime, albeit hard to categorise, appears to share an imperist nomos with historical fascisms; and that imperism’s ultimate scope exceeds that of nationalist irredentism. The paper ends with a reflection on the advantageous epistemological potentialities of imperism as a category.

“Общество” как государственное установление. Социально-исторические аспекты российской государственной власти в XVIII веке

In 1966, Dietrich Geyer published an article on the subject of state-society relations in eighteenth-century Russia, which appeared again in 1975 in an updated form. Geyer placed Catherine II’s reform policy in a European context and asked about the policy of absolute monarchies towards corporative structures and the conditions for the development of civil societies. In the Russian case, Catherine II created “societies” in the form of noble and urban corporations in order to expand provincial administration. According to Geyer’s thesis, both the statist origins of these corporate estates and the connection between noble societies and provincial administration hindered the emergence of a dualism between state and society in Russian history.

Case system in learning Russian as a first and second foreign language

The task of creating innovative technologies for teaching Russian as a native, as a non-native and as a foreign language, taking into account the age of students, their cognitive abilities and features of the first language, is relevant. The solution of this problem requires a fundamental psycholinguistic study of the processes accompanying the formation of the language mechanisms of children and adults. The aim of this research is to specify the ideas about mastering the category of Russian case in various conditions of language acquisition. The method of comparative analysis of the processes of mastering Russian case in monolingualism, simultaneous child bilingualism, studying Russian as a foreign language and Russian language acquisition by a foreign-speaking child in the process of communication, was used. The material was collected during longitudinal observation of the speech of primary school students from St. Petersburg, who were native speakers of Turkic and Caucasian languages. The classification of errors in selecting and constructing case forms is proposed. The ways of access to the mental lexicon and the mechanisms of procedural grammar rules formation are described. The conclusion is that there is the imbalance between the cognitive and communicative development of a foreign child and the level of language proficiency, which leads to a detailed, but grammatically unformed statement, characteristic of a successive natural bilingual. When Russian-speaking child resorts to retrieving ready-made frameworks of prepositional case constructions from memory, the foreign child independently constructs them in speech, preferring to use basic and reduced forms. In the future, it is necessary to develop a unified toolkit for studying grammar mechanisms formation and to increase the empirical base of the study. The information about speech ontogenesis obtained as a result of the study must be taken into account for developing scientifically based methods of teaching Russian as a non-native language and as a foreign language.

Mastering the ways of indicating transport when mastering Russian as a native and as a foreign language

The subject of the article's research is the peculiarities of prepositional-case constructions with the meaning of vehicle in children's monolingual speech, in the speech of Chinese students studying Russian as a foreign language and in the speech of heritage Russian speakers with different dominant languages. The study examines case constructions with the meaning of movement. The specificity of mastering grammatical construction in the course of mastering Russian as a native language, as one of the native languages, and as a foreign language is analyzed. The research material was experimental data collected in a children's classroom and in an adult foreign audience, as well as information from the “Russian Academic Corps /RLC” (Corpus of the Linguistic Laboratory for Corpus Technologies of the National Research University Higher School of Economics, containing information about the development of Russian as a foreign language and native speakers of Russian with different dominant languages). The research methodology included: longitudinal observation of the speech of monolingual children, psycholinguistic experiment in a foreign audience, corpus research method; comparative research, semantic and functional analysis. The scientific novelty of the proposed work lies in the fact that for the first time a comparative analysis of data is presented that describes the ways of mastering the case construction with the meaning of indicating transport by Russian-speaking children, Chinese students and heritage native speakers of the Russian language. Typical differences and errors in the choice of construction are considered, the strategy of simplification in the speech of foreign students is described, and the ways of grammatical interference are analyzed. Analysis of errors made by Russian-speaking children and adult foreigners allows us to draw conclusions about the specifics of mastering Russian case meanings. Errors in choosing a case ending with a correctly chosen preposition are often observed in the speech of foreign students and heritage speakers, but do not appear in children's speech. Thus, in the Russian language there is a wide variety of ways to indicate a vehicle. Choosing the correct construction when indicating transport represents a specific difficulty in the course of mastering Russian as a foreign language and requires special attention.

Development of ecotourism in the Volga region: Case studies and strategies

Purpose: This study investigates the advancement of ecotourism in the Volga Region, drawing insights from international and Russian case studies. The aim is to identify key factors contributing to successful ecotourism development and to provide recommendations for enhancing sustainability in the region's tourism sector. Research Methodology: Employing qualitative and comparative methodologies, the study utilized interviews, surveys, and document analysis for data collection. Additionally, site visits and observations were conducted to gain firsthand insights into ecotourism practices. Results: The Volga Region demonstrates substantial potential for ecotourism development, leveraging its rich natural resources, cultural heritage, and a burgeoning interest in sustainable tourism practices. However, challenges such as infrastructure limitations and inadequate marketing strategies need to be addressed to fully capitalize on this potential. Limitations: The study is constrained by data availability, time limitations, and the scope of the case studies examined. Additionally, the subjective nature of qualitative research methods may introduce bias into the findings. Contribution: This research enhances our comprehension of ecotourism development strategies, particularly within the Volga Region context. It offers valuable insights for policymakers, researchers, and industry practitioners aiming to foster sustainable tourism practices and economic growth in the region.

Federalism at war: Putin’s blame game, regional governors, and the invasion of Ukraine

ABSTRACT Center–regional relations in Putin’s Russia are marked by strict hierarchies, with regional governors serving as agents to the principal–the federal center. This (authoritarian) mode of federalism allows the federal center to maintain the president’s popularity, by shifting blame for policy failures from the presidency onto other federal political institutions and the regions. The article investigates how the regime reacted to the full-scale warfare against Ukraine. It theoretically elaborates on strategies of blame avoidance in personalist and federal autocracies and applies this framework to the Russian case. Using data from official documents and media reports, it demonstrates that the federal center again resorted to vertical blame-shifting, by formally and informally assigning the regional governors with several unpopular tasks, above all – casualty reporting and mobilization. The war confirmed center–regional relations as a practical venue for blame avoidance, which helps Putin’s regime overcome crises, contributing to its coping resilience.

Legitimacy deficits in the private higher education sector: categories in evaluating Russian universities

ABSTRACT This paper explores the regulators’ perspective and demonstrates how legitimacy deficits of private universities outweigh performance results in decisions regarding university inspections. We examined the period when the regulator had an urgent claim on Russian universities, particularly during the campaign to ‘clean the system of higher education’ announced in 2013. The Russian case of delayed regulation provides a unique natural phenomenon for studying how evaluators choose which universities to inspect. This study relies on administrative data on university inspections, which are merged with the results of annual evaluations of universities conducted by the Ministry from 2013 to 2016, encompassing 8227 cases. Our findings indicate that private universities and their branches are more likely to undergo inspection than public HEIs, even after considering information about their performance results. For state officials, private institutions exemplify market logic, which is seen as a competing rule of the game to state logic. These results suggest that organizational categories hold considerable promise for further research as they may contribute to understanding how universities are evaluated and scrutinized, a phenomenon typically considered as driven by performance-based criteria.

(Heritage) Russian Case Marking: Variation and Paths of Change

Russian’s six cases and multiple noun classes make case marking potentially challenging ground for heritage speakers. Indeed, morphological levelling, “probably the best-described feature of language loss”, has been substantiated. One study from 2006 showed that Heritage Russian speakers in the USA produced canonical or prescribed markers for only 13% of preposition+nominal sequences. Conversely, another study from 2020 found that Heritage Russian speakers in Toronto produce a 94% canonical case marker rate in conversational speech. To explore the effects of methodological differences across several studies, the current paper circumscribes the context to preposition+nominal sequences in Heritage Russian speech from the same Toronto corpus as used by the 2020 study but mirroring the domain investigated by Polinsky and including a Homeland comparison to consider changes in both the rates of use of canonical case marking and distributional patterns of non-canonical use. Regression models show more canonical case marking in more frequent words, an independent effect of slightly more mismatch by later generations, but less morphological levelling than reported by Polinsky. Lexicon size does not predict case marking rates as strongly as language usage patterns do, but generation, since immigration, is the best-fitting social predictor. We confirm (small) rate changes in Heritage (vs. Homeland) Russian canonical case marking but not in patterns of levelling.

The Interaction of Linguistic and Visual Cues for the Processing of Case in Russian by Russian-German Bilinguals: An Eye Tracking Study.

Modulation of visual attention in the Visual World Paradigm relies on parallel processing of linguistic and visual information. Previous studies have argued that the human linguistic capacity includes an aspect of anticipation of upcoming material. Such anticipation can be triggered by both lexical and grammatical/morphosyntactic cues. In this study, we investigated the relationship between comprehension and prediction by testing how subtle changes in visual representations can affect the processing of grammatical case cues in Russian by Russian-German bilingual children (n = 49, age 8-13). The linguistic manipulation followed previous designs, contrasting SVO and OVS sentences, where the first NP (NP1) was marked with nominative or accusative case, respectively. Three types of visual displays were compared: (i) individual referents (potential agent/theme); (ii) pairs of referents (NP1 + potential agent/theme); and (iii) events (representing interactions between the referents). Participants were significantly more sensitive to the case manipulation when presented with events compared to the other two types of visual display. This suggests that they were able to quickly integrate the thematic role information signaled by grammatical case in the event representations. However, they were less likely to use the case information to anticipate upcoming arguments when the target pictures represented individual referents or pairs of noninteracting referents. We hypothesize that the process of argument anticipation is mediated by the activation of syntactic templates (SVO or OSV, depending on the case marking on NP1). The relatively weak anticipation effect observed may be attributed to the absence, or weak representation, of the noncanonical OVS template in the bilingual children's long-term memory.

The Illusion of “Smart” Sanctions: The Russian Case

The 21st century has seen a gradual shift from overwhelming sanctions, mainly trade embargoes, towards targeted or “smart” sanctions. The latter target designated natural and legal persons associated with a country’s government, while ostensibly imposing minimal hardship on its general population. However, many empirical studies prove the existence of significant spillover effects and collateral damage from targeted sanctions. This research aims to determine whether “smart” sanctions are a reality, or a myth created to legitimize their use. The analysis shows that targeted sanctions against Russia have had spillover effects beyond the targets. The authors consider four types of spillover effects—economic, political, legal, and psychological (or reputational) ones—and suggest the criteria that determine how targeted a sanction is.

ОСОБЕННОСТИ ФОРМАТА "СПЕЦПРОЕКТ" В СОВРЕМЕННЫХ ИНТЕРНЕТ-СМИ (НА ПРИМЕРЕ ТАСС И "МЕДИАМАКС")

The article deals with an issue of forming a “special project” in the leading Internet publications of Armenia and Russia, on the one hand, in the context of growing digitalization and globalization of the media space, and on the other hand, against the background of geopolitical turbulence of recent years and large-scale international-political shifts. The author notes that there is not just multimedization of traditional journalism genres, but also the emergence of genre-format transformations of the content of the media operating in the Internet space, i.e. new formats and genres that are more adaptive and relevant to modern realities. Among them, she proposes to include the “special project”. Understanding “special project” as a set of various information products, a hybrid format consisting of various multimedia and interactive genres / formats / methods, related to specific issues, forming certain images and ideas and addressed to a usually more or less easily identifiable audience, the author subjects the content analysis of the special projects of the Russian news agency TASS and Armenian media holding “Mediamax” published from 2018 to 2023. The analysis shows that in both Armenian and Russian cases the most demanded special projects are those on historical themes, which may be related to the growing importance of historical politics in the post-Soviet space and the search for new media tools for the formation and dissemination of certain historical narratives.

Distinguishing Ontological Security from Security of Identity: The Case of Russian “Relokanty” in Tbilisi in the Aftermath of the 2022 Russian Invasion of Ukraine

This article seeks to contribute to the burgeoning debate on ontological security (OS) in International Relations (IR), and sides with that part of OS scholarship that emphasizes the distinction between “security of identity” and “security of the self”. We empirically show the need for separating these two concepts by discussing the case of Russian relokanty in Tbilisi in aftermath of the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine. Also due to the history of conflict between Moscow and Tbilisi, Russian relokanty in Georgia have found themselves in a strongly pro-Ukraine environment, and have thus faced various shaming attempts by some locals. This, combined with the existential crisis they already felt due to their country’s invasion of Ukraine, has ignited personal reflections regarding their sense of self and their identity. We thus conducted fifty semi-structured interviews with Russian relokanty in Georgia, and methodologically traced ontological insecurity as manifested by its “symptoms” of anxiety and feeling of limbo. We highlight the difference between the security of identity and security of the self by: (1) discussing how a majority of respondents displayed symptoms of ontological insecurity, but only a minority of them also experienced an identity crisis; (2) and showing how those respondents who did shift identity as a result of an identity crisis, ultimately failed to re-establish security of the self.

Intergenerational dynamics of migrants' family memory: global trends and Russian specifics

The article is devoted to the analysis of intergenerational features of the transformation of the migrants’ family memory in the context of global trends in five Russian regions. Using transnational and praxeological approaches, the authors examined the migrants’ family memory as a configuration of narratives and practices, including the memory of both the country of origin and the commemorative practices of the host society. Based on the biographical method of Fritz Schütze, the authors identified and analyzed the curves of family narratives of the first, 1.5 and second generations of migrants. The article concluded that family commemorations continue to play an important role in constructing the identity of migrant communities in the Russian provinces. The main difference between the Russian case and global trends in the transformation of migrants’ family memory is the dominance of first-generation migrants influencing family commemorations. It was concluded that “parallel” communities of memory between migrants and the host society are preserved. With regard to migrants, this was expressed in their openness only to the Russian language, while their attitude towards Russian traditions and festive culture was neutral. Turning to the generational features of the transmission and reproduction of family memory revealed an increase in differences between the first and second generations. Based on the three most common ways of relating to the family past in the second generation (reluctance to adopt, uncritical perception of traditions, co-production of common meaning), potential conflict zones were identified in intergenerational relationships regarding shared family memories.