AbstractIn contemporary Russia, online discourses on gender reflect the complex legacies of the Soviet and post-Soviet attitudes and approaches to masculinity and femininity. The current discourses on gender affect its digital construction. Mirroring the gendered discourses on masculine and feminine roles and patterns of behavior, digital media spaces impose similar restrictions and expectations on female users as those experienced by women in their offline activities. This chapter offers an analysis of how the World Wide Web and digital technologies influence gender identity politics in contemporary Russian society. We look at the ways Russians construct gender online, how their practices become means of resistance and activism, and how they adapt and shape digital technologies to perform their gender identities and communicate with the State in the situation of increasing surveillance and control of material and cyberspaces.
This open access handbook presents a multidisciplinary and multifaceted perspective on how the 'digital' is simultaneously changing Russia and the research methods scholars use to study Russia. It provides a critical update on how Russian society, politics, economy, and culture are reconfigured in the context of ubiquitous connectivity and accounts for the political and societal responses to digitalization. In addition, it answers practical and methodological questions in handling Russian data and a wide array of digital methods. The volume makes a timely intervention in our understanding of the changing field of Russian Studies and is an essential guide for scholars, advanced undergraduate and graduate students studying Russia today.
This open access handbook presents a multidisciplinary and multifaceted perspective on how the 'digital' is simultaneously changing Russia and the research methods scholars use to study Russia. It provides a critical update on how Russian society, politics, economy, and culture are reconfigured in the context of ubiquitous connectivity and accounts for the political and societal responses to digitalization. In addition, it answers practical and methodological questions in handling Russian data and a wide array of digital methods. The volume makes a timely intervention in our understanding of the changing field of Russian Studies and is an essential guide for scholars, advanced undergraduate and graduate students studying Russia today.
Abstract The concept of linguistic complexity, understood broadly as a range of basic and elaborate structures available and accessible to learners as evidenced in their production of speech and writing (Ortega, 2003), has featured prominently in second language development research since the inception of the field. The field of heritage language acquisition, however, has only recently begun to engage linguistic complexity as a comprehensive lens for studying heritage language development. The current study contributes to this fledgling area of research by investigating automatically extracted measures of syntactic complexity in the written language of heritage learners of Russian at various developmental levels. The analysis of 12 measures of syntactic complexity allows us to conclude that the majority of automatically extracted indices differentiate proficiency levels of heritage speakers in the study. The study results provide important insights into the nature of heritage language development and are readily applicable for assessment and pedagogical purposes.