Our panel, Mediated portrayals of communities in the context of the war in Ukraine, takes place on Tuesday 17th on June 2025 from 14.00 PM to 15.30 PM (GMT+3).
The panelists Jukka Jouhki (Tampere University), Ilkhom Khalimzoda (University of Jyväskylä), Anna Matyska (University of Warsaw), Teemu Oivo (University of Eastern Finland) and John Postill (RMIT University), explore in their presentations how different communities are portrayed and compared in media coverage of the war in Ukraine, and examine how states, societies, cultures, alliances, transnational organizations, or “civilizations” involved or perceived to be involved in the war are characterized, (re)defined, or (re/de)valued in the media.
The panel will be open to all via Zoom (Meeting ID: 627 6508 5635). You are welcome to join us for the insightful discussion!
More info on FAS COMPARISONS 2025 Programme site:
Papers:
Narratives of the West in Finnish news in the context of the war in Ukraine
Jukka Jouhki, Tampere University
The Finnish news narratives of war in Ukraine emphasize the West’s role in supporting Ukraine’s fight for independence and existence. This perspective views the conflict as a struggle not only for Ukraine but for all Western nations. The West, though conceptually vague, is portrayed as a unified geopolitical entity. It appears that the war has reinforced Western unity and simplified public discourse, presenting the West as a homogeneous community. This narrative is rooted in both empirical political reality and a form of Occidentalism, which emphasizes the West’s unique cultural and political existence. Occidentalism, similar to Orientalism, frames the West as a distinct entity. This paper explores three forms of Occidentalism: exclusive, generalizing, and substantive. These forms shape how the West is perceived and discussed in public discourse. The paper discusses how deconstructing unneccesary Western-centric narratives might promote a more accurate and inclusive understanding of global dynamics, especially during crises.
The impact of social media groups on news interpretation
Ilkhom Khalimzoda, University of Jyväskylä
Mass media is often referred as the fourth pillar of democracy, acting as a watchdog. However, social media might be changing this role. Traditionally, gatekeeping in media was about editorial choices on what gets published. With social media, gatekeeping extends to post-publication, where audiences shape and reinterpret news. This study explores how large social media groups, like Russian-speaking Facebook groups with around 50,000 members, function as regional media outlets. These groups post and moderate content, control comments, and manage membership without accountability. We investigate how these groups engage in post-publication gatekeeping, examining the roles of audiences and moderators. Our focus is on the narratives promoted or challenged within these groups, and how they influence the conversation. This research aims to uncover forms of ”othering,” such as creating divisions like ”us versus them” or ”Russia versus the West.” By analyzing these dynamics, we hope to understand how these groups construct reality and influence public perception through mediated news articles.
Diasporic frames of war: mediating transnational engagement for Ukraine
Anna Matyska, University of Warsaw
War in Ukraine has prompted Ukrainian diasporas across the globe to engage on behalf of their war-torn homeland, including pleading for help from their countries of residence/second homelands. Social media has become a crucial mediator of this diasporic engagement. This article explores how two diasporic Ukrainian organizations, “Euromaidan” in Poland and the “Israeli Friends of Ukraine” in Israel, frame the war on their social media channels on Instagram and Facebook to mediate and encourage action. My analysis is based on the year-long observation of the channels between January 2024 and January 2025. It is supported by the ongoing fieldwork composed of interviews and participant observation of the Ukrainian diaspora in Poland and interviews with Israeli Ukrainians conducted in Israel in the first half of 2024. My aim is to look comparatively at the social media activities of these two organizations, exploring their similarities and differences, but also to look critically at how they themselves engage in “the politics of comparison” (Idris 2016, Stoler 2001, Anderson 2016) to further their cause. The politics of comparison implies that comparison is embedded in power relations through, for instance, stressing certain differences while obscuring others. Accordingly, both organizations frame the war as a transnationally extended zone of suffering, but they also stress parallels with political-historical conditions in their countries of residence that create contradictory narratives between the organizations. This includes the opposing framing of the war in Gaza as a comparative “conflict frame” (Semetko and Valkenburg 2000) for the Ukrainian war.
Collective self-images: Russian-language online discussions on life in Finland
Teemu Oivo, University of Eastern Finland
The conceptual definition of Finland’s ’Russians’ is complex, as they are both united and divided by factors such as residential history in different countries, their relationship to the Soviet Union, culture, memory, media use, citizenship, external recognition, and self-identification. Language is arguably the most prominent identifier, highlighting the group’s significance as Finland’s largest unofficial language minority. However, grouping diverse peoples, from Russians to Ukrainians, together in public and academic discourse simply due to their language is criticised as well. The image of Russian-ness in Finland carries a historic burden. Following Russia’s aggression towards Ukraine in 2014, and especially from 2022 onwards, people’s social bonds and mobility to Russia, citizenship, and even language have increasingly become part of popular national security discussions. Generally, times of insecurity have brought questions of national identity to the forefront, while Finland is arguably more multicultural than ever. This presentation examines the collective self-images represented in Russian-language online discussion groups focused on life in Finland. The study is conducted via unobtrusive auto-netnography between 2023 and 2024. The discussions reveal both explicit conversations and implicit implications about how participants perceive their imagined audience, how representative this audience is of Russians or more broadly Russian speakers in Finland, and how they discuss the often-conflicting images of themselves in Finnish journalistic media.
The anti-woke schism over the war in Ukraine: a comparison of four hybrid media personas
John Postill, RMIT University
In recent years, a highly diverse ‘anti-woke movement’ (Johansen 2023, 2024, Postill 2024) has shaped the culture wars and media representations of countries across the Western hemisphere and beyond. Led by powerful media figures such as Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Jordan Peterson, Bret Weinstein, Sam Harris, Javier Milei, and Agustin Laje, in early 2022 this loose movement found itself divided over the war in Ukraine. While some prominent anti-wokes fully sided with Ukraine, others offered more sceptical and/or conspiracist takes on the Western elites’ designs towards Russia. In this paper I draw from long-term online ethnographic research to explain why the Ukraine issue failed to unite the anti-woke movement despite appearing to be a textbook case of an authoritarian attack on the liberal West. I do this by comparing the making of four hybridly mediated personas on Ukraine by as many anti-woke content creators, namely the persona of a conspiracy theorist (Bret Weinstein), a prophet of doom (Jordan Peterson), a cultural translator (Konstantin Kisin), and a liberal democrat (Cathy Young). I argue that far from living in a monolithic right-wing filter bubble, these diverse figures/personas are skilled at navigating the hybrid, multimodal media system made up of both old and new media (Chadwick 2017) – not least when they critique ‘the media narrative’ on the Ukraine war.