One component in the generational experience strongly related to media is the intimate and often passionate relation that is developed towards media technologies and content from one’s formative youth period: musical genres and stars, as well as reproduction technologies such as the vinyl record, music cassette tapes, comics and other now dead media forms. Passion, however, is a dialectic concept that not only refers to the joyful desire and intense emotional engagement of cherished objects but also includes its dialectic opposite in the form of pain and suffering. This passion, it is argued in the article, is activated by the nostalgic relationships to past media experiences, the bittersweet remembrances of media habits connected to earlier life phases of one’s own. Taking its point of departure in generational theory of Mannheim and others, this article analyses a series of focus group interviews with Swedish and Estonian media users tentatively belonging to four different generations. Based on the analysis of these interviews, it is suggested that passion and nostalgia are produced, first, in relation to old technologies, second, in relation to childhood memories and, third, at the limits of shared intergenerational experience, that is, at the moment when one realises that one’s own experiences of past media forms cannot be shared by younger generations, and especially one’s own children.

Since the late 1990s, nation branding has attracted a lot of attention from academics, professional consultants and government actors. The ideas and practices of nation branding are frequently presented by branding advocates as necessary and even inevitable in the light of changing dynamics of political power and influence in a globalised and media-saturated world. In this context, some have argued that nation branding is a way to reduce international conflict and supplant ethno-nationalism with a new form of market-based, national image management. However, a growing body of critical studies has documented that branding campaigns tend to produce ahistorical and exclusionary representations of the nation and advance a form of ‘commercial nationalism’ that is problematic. Importantly, the critical scholarship on nation branding has relied primarily on sociological and anthropological theories of nationhood, identities and markets. By contrast, the role of the media – as institutions, systems and societal storytellers – has been undertheorised in relation to nation branding. The majority of the existing literature tends to treat the media as ‘neutral’ vehicles for the delivery of branding messages to various audiences. This is the guest editors’ introduction to the Special Issue ‘Theorizing Media in Nation Branding’, which seeks to problematise this overly simplistic view of ‘the media’ and aims to articulate the various ways in which specific media are an integral part of nation branding. It adopts an interdisciplinary approach and problematises both the enabling and the inhibiting potentialities of different types of media as they perpetuate nation branding ideas, images, ideologies, discourses and practices.

This article examines the post-Soviet transformations of Russian popular music culture (Estrada), arguing that its aesthetics can be analysed from the perspective of camp, by looking at two cult music performers bridging the Soviet and post-Soviet realm – Valery Leontiev and Filipp Kirkorov. The analysis is grounded in a close reading of the artists’ career trajectories, selected videos and – to a lesser extent – textual analysis of their lyrics and public statements. The article argues that their performative personas are rooted in a particular version of camp with differing modalities of subversiveness – each responding both to their respective cultural and political climates, audience expectations, and also in accordance with their individual embodiments of (post)-Soviet camp. While Leontiev demonstrates a more earnest commitment to high drama, Kirkorov continues his ironic experimentation with transgression, ambiguity and excess, thereby participating in the queering of post-Soviet popular culture. The article concludes that their appropriation of camp is strategic, as it responds to the temporal, national and global trends such as global gay culture and neo-camp in Russia.

This essay argues against trends in cultural studies to avoid textuality and mediation in favour of a presumably direct access to reality, materiality or lived experience. Grand gestures of stepping out of modern thinking in toto might be rhetorically effective, but turn out to be expressions of a critical self-reflexivity on the productive contradictions within modernity. The centrality of the concept of mediation is defended in two opposite directions. Against reductionisms of absence that reify and totalize textual structures, communication is understood as a dialectic tension between subjects, texts and contexts. Against reductionisms of presence or immediacy, textual interpretations provide necessary mediations for all experience. Problematic formulations by Lawrence Grossberg and others are discussed, where material relations or histories and ethnographies of lived experience are believed to render textual interpretations superfluous. On the basis of Paul Ricoeur’s hermeneutics, a communicative model for culture and cultural studies is outlined.

The proliferation and recycling of Soviet popular culture and history is a central ingredient of post-Soviet film and television production, leading to accusations that the Russian media is nurturing nostalgia. Nostalgia can hardly account for the manifold uses of the Soviet past in contemporary Russian television programming. Nevertheless, in the aftermath of the Crimean annexation, it became evident that nostalgia for a strong empire with a strong ruling hand' was part of Putin's symbolic politics for several years. Keeping these considerations in mind, this article investigates how nostalgia extends into the domain of television and becomes an element of symbolic politics, employing a case study of two documentaries produced during Putin's presidency to focus the analysis. This study also examines how contemporary Russian television uses footage and film clips from the socialist period and witness testimonies to dismantle' popular myths.

In information and media affluent societies, the critical ability of citizens is increasingly important. This is reflected in a number of political initiatives that aim at engaging citizens in questions of media content and production, often labelled as media literacy. In this context, skills related to media technologies that are often accentuated in media literacy education are a necessary but not sufficient condition for media literacy. Critical reflexivity and critical practices are crucial for media literacy and therefore in the centre of this article. This article proposes an analysis of media criticism from a citizens’ perspective. Drawing on solicited, open-ended online diaries as well as in-depth interviews with young Estonian citizens, the article applies an inductive approach to media criticism while paying attention to the specific context in which the media criticism arises.

The 1960s witnessed the emergence of television as a global medium. One way of demonstrating the powers and possibilities of television was the production and airing of transnational broadcast events. In order to produce these, national broadcast organizations had to engage in joint production of such events. The article examines two such events: Gagarin's return to Moscow after orbiting the earth in April 1961 and the more well-known Our World' broadcast 6 years later. At the time of their production, these broadcasts were seen as crucial moments in television history, as prototypes of what could be expected of television in the future. They also relied on extensive cooperation between broadcast organizations in socialist and Western countries, organizations that to a large extent shared the same production values but also had to negotiate competing visions of the geography of modern communications networks. The broadcasts discussed in this article thus provide the opportunity to reflect upon the shaping of television history and global media memories. Based on case studies of the planning and production of the broadcasts, the article argues that global power relations have shaped the remembered history of television and therefore must be part of our understanding of it.

This article presents an analysis of the makeover reality show Real Men, which was broadcast on Swedish television in 2016. The analysis shows that Real Men – like other shows of its genre – functions as a form of ‘governmentality’ through which forms of neoliberal subjectivity are propagated and pedagogically enforced on ‘bad subjects’. However, the show surpasses the genre conventions by questioning the authority of the norms and values (i.e. middle-class, cosmopolitan and urban values) that are being propagated and in letting the values held by the working-class men on the show eventually be victorious and accepted within the narrative. The purpose of this article is to try to make sense of a popular cultural artefact such as Real Men against the background of the crisis of legitimacy for the neoliberal ideology and the rise of (right-wing) populism, and to try to understand how the forms and genres of popular culture transform and respond to this changing political context. © The Author(s) 2018.

The Ukrainian Euromaidan protests in 2013, alongside the Brexit vote and the so-called ‘refugee crisis’, have strongly changed the imaginary of Europe. Apart from ideological shifts and geopolitical changes, the situation in Ukraine has led to a geographic relocation and displacement of media producers and audiences alike. Yet, in the Ukrainian context and beyond, little is known about dislocated journalists in conflict situations. This article addresses the specific experiences of immigrant and internally displaced journalists, their imagined audiences and the overarching construction of post-revolutionary Ukraine as an imagined community. The argument draws empirically from the dislocatory experiences and relocatory trajectories of two groups: immigrant journalists, who moved to Ukraine from Russia, and journalists who migrated internally – to Kyiv and other government-controlled Ukrainian regions from Crimea and non-government-controlled areas of Donbas. For immigrant and internally displaced journalists, the search for new identities and positions is strongly related to their imagination of the audiences. The journalists notice a simultaneous fragmentation and unification of the audiences driven by both top-down and down-up intentions of post-revolutionary nation building. They hope to contribute to turning the fragmented communities into a media nation that will perceive them as ‘us’.