The Department for Discourse and Communication Studies
Contemporary media environment is formed by dense concentration and interaction of cultures, languages, channels and modalities of communication. Polyphonic, diverse and fragmented, it also shows increasing convergence and integration, to which globalization and technological processes powerfully contribute. Across this new terrain, rich, exciting and risky, the new generation of media practitioners, teachers, researchers and public intellectuals is expected to navigate competently and creatively.
Studying language, literature and media within frames of narrow specialization does not answer the needs of today or challenges of tomorrow. Nor can the idea of intercultural communication be limited (as it was – only recently) to relatively formal contact between established national cultures. The delicate and ubiquitous complexity of hybrid forms calls for the new theoretical framework, the new tools of analysis as well as active interdisciplinary exchange and collaboration.
The department for discourse and communication studies in the School of Philology of Moscow Lomonosov University strives to provide for advanced level of verbal and visual (media) literacy, enabling students to combine critical and creative objectives, develop sophisticated analytical perspectives on the intersections of media, culture, translation, speech communication practices and social analysis.
Major concentration is on the following subject fields:
- Theory and comparative history of the media (oral, written and printed word, visual, audial and digital media), their development and interaction in the contemporary global context.
- Society and culture as an “ensemble” of communicative practices; means and channels for intra- and inter-cultural communication; construction of cultural memory through text; uses of literary and social imagination.
- Mass culture – its social, political, aesthetic and other aspects.