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This doctoral dissertation analyzes participation in alternative media, taking the reader to the Russia of the late 2010s. Bringing together discourse theory, media and communication studies and political theory, it approaches participation in media production through the lens of performativity. The conceptualization of participation as a performance helps explore the material, embodied and spatial enactments of discourses that sustain the fragile and unstable process of production. The data of this study comprise several months of participant observations, interviews with media producers, and textual analysis of media content. The research employs a case-study method and focuses on media that explicitly delegate their participants the right to co-decide on matters of content production and internal organizing process. The three cases under study are Russia's oldest anarchist medium Avtonom, the student medium DOXA, and the web-based zine Discours. Data analysis integrates qualitative content analysis and a discourse-theoretical approach, informed by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe's discourse theory alongside its subsequent developments within the Essex School. The study looks into the distribution of power in alternative media amidst an internal diversity, material constraints, and an antagonistic relationship with the state. The analysis constructs a model of participation, which shows its embeddedness into multiple and partially overlapping communities. A vibrant sociality and the potential for a further expansion of the media communities emerge as two of the key conditions of the participatory process. Furthermore, participation is supported by an ongoing performance of a multiplicity of identities, in which the more elitist articulations of journalism are intertwined with some empowering and counter-hegemonic notions of media production, media producers, and the audience. Retaining a critical-explanatory focus, the dissertation explores the limits of power-sharing, such as the persistence of journalistic professionalism, the scarce resources of the media and vulnerability inflicted by the state. The static representation of the state as the major confronting force reveals the paradoxical nature of social antagonism: while mobilizing the limited resources, it also reduces participatory intensities and triggers a politics of trust that restricts access to media production. This dissertation offers a number of theoretical and empirical contributions to several fields. Some of its key insights relate to participation beyond institutional politics, the hybridity of mainstream and alternative media, the interconnection of discourse, materiality and affect, and an empirical applicability of discourse theory.

Abstract
This article examines the discursive construction of nature as represented by the Swedish TV documentary Tvångsförflyttningar – Bággojohtin, which narrates the history of forced displacements of the indigenous people of Sami in northern Sweden in the early 20th century. Our discursive-material analysis highlights the role of nature in these displacements, and how, in these tragic historical developments, nature was regulated by the antagonistically positioned discursive frameworks of the state and the Sami, both of which, in very different ways, sought to integrate it into their respective systems of meaning. By bringing attention to the interconnection of the discursive and the material, we argue that nature, through a series of subversive acts, resisted both the environmental governmentality of the state and the counter-hegemonic environmental knowledge of the Sami. Thus, the article contributes to the understanding of the multiple discursive struggles around flora and fauna, but also nature's own agency and voice.

The article brings Laclau and Mouffe's discourse theory into the empirical context of contemporary Russia to analyse the complex relationships between the state and alternative media. In contrast to the mainstream narrative that paints the picture of a strong authoritarian state with a grip over democratic liberties and civil society, we suggest a more nuanced perspective on the subject that focuses on the struggle over the articulation of the identity of the state. Through an ethnography (combined with interviews and textual analysis) of three Russian alternative media outlets – Avtonom, Discours and DOXA – this article demonstrates how they critique the hegemonic state discourse, how they evade it through their practices, and how they perform counter-hegemonic alternatives. Even if their resistance is severely countered by the state, their practices are seen to de-naturalise the nodal points of centrality and unity which constitute the hegemonic state discourse. As these practices contain alternative articulations of the state discourse, the importance of alternative media for rethinking the state (and resisting it) should not be underestimated.

In this article we study campaign material of the Swedish party Feminist Initiative (FI) during the 2014 parliamentary election campaign in Sweden. Approaching the topic from discourse-theoretical and intersectional perspectives, we ask how the inclusion of various social groups into the hegemonic project of feminist politics becomes possible, what was constructed as an antagonist to feminist politics, and in what ways it impeded FI to realise such politics. Our findings show that intersectionality allowed FI to include every group/individual into its feminist political project as long as they experienced oppression. Even though racists and nationalists in general (the Sweden Democrats in particular) were singled out as antagonists, it was mainly norms and structures that were addressed in the online material as standing in the way for FI to fulfil both their identity and hegemonic project.

The article focuses on the main frames created by leading American politicians during the latest presidential campaign to influence the nation.The authors analyze the interconnection between mental and language structures in political discourse. The corpus analysis of concepts and frames in Obama and Romney texts according to conceptual metaphor theory of George Lakoff demonstrates that during 2012 presidential campaign Barack Obama successfully applied the basic conceptual metaphor STATE AS THE NURTURANT PARENT in contrast with the basic metaphor STATE AS THE STRICT FATHER used by the Republican leader Mitt Romney.

Based on the analysis of scientific resources on the theory of government, political process and public policy, the authors substantiate a conceptual model for assessing the stability and sustainability of state systems. The model is based on empirical analysis of the stability and sustainability of state systems obtained through semi-structured interviews with experts. The authors' approach includes four main parameters for assessing the stability and sustainability of state systems with the focus on the role of state institutions in coordinating modern politics. The authors emphasize that the notion of 'transition from government to governance' often discussed in Russian and foreign scientific literature only demonstrates the possible changes in the role of state institutions in the public area and directions of transformation of public policy, without directly imply that. In this case, it seems promising to search for such conditions that would direct the transformation, and to develop a conceptual framework for diagnosing the state systems' capacity to change.

This article explores Swedish parties' activities on Instagram during the 2014 elections. Understanding party campaign communication as highly strategic, that is, communication to persuade and mobilize voters in order to win the elections, we ask whether Instagram was used to (1) broadcast campaign messages, (2) mobilize supporters, (3) manage the party's image, and (4) amplify and complement other campaign material (i.e., hybrid campaign use). With this study, we follow previous studies on the use of digital communication platforms in the hands of campaigning political actors, but we direct our attention to a new platform. We conducted a content analysis of 220 party postings on Instagram, collected during the hot phase of the campaign. The result shows that the platform was mainly used for broadcasting rather than for mobilization. The image the parties were presenting leaned toward personalization with a strong presence of top candidates in their postings. Top candidates were primarily displayed in a political/professional context. Finally, half of the analyzed postings showed signs of hybridized campaign practices. The presented findings give a first glimpse on how political parties use and perform on Instagram.