By reconstructing disinformation's multiple border crossings - temporal, linguistic, cultural - (Mis)translating Deceit (MD) will re-orient existing approaches to disinformation. It will interrogate common misconceptions about disinformation, treating it as a translingual, historically mutating phenomenon forged within the sociopolitically contingent realm of discourse.
Learn MoreThe Ukraine war, Covid-19 and the Trump presidency highlight the threat disinformation poses to democracy. Yet the implicit persistence of Cold War binaries – pitting democratic 'truth-telling' against totalitarian 'deceit', even in relation to homegrown disinformation – has seriously hampered attempts to counter this problem in the multipolar, Big Data age.
Learn MoreWe will employ a 5-stage methodological toolset focusing on a discourse analysis of seven specific disinformation campaigns assigned Russian/Soviet provenance by one of the world's leading counter-disinformation units. We will pay special attention to the dynamic linking 'disinformation narratives' and the conceptual apparatus applied to them by disinformation monitors.
Learn MoreBy rethinking the conceptual framework in which disinformation is understood, to develop innovative qualitative methods for studying it as a translingual, historically contingent discourse, laying the grounds for a transformative new Critical Disinformation Studies (CDS)
Through the application of this new conceptual framework and methodology, to improve our understanding of the mutation of disinformation discourses and narratives over time and across lingua-cultural and geopolitical divides, filling a major gap in the field and correcting the hitherto monolingual bias in its coverage
To facilitate a Modern Languages-led interdisciplinary investigation of a major societal challenge, generating a CDS toolset that enhances the ability of modern linguists to address this challenge by incorporating methods from Cold War history, translation studies, audience research, media studies, security, and cybersecurity studies (including their policy dimensions) and discourse analysis
To carry out a range of detailed historical and contemporary case studies reconstructing the full dynamic in which the relationship between the calibration of narratives by their producers, their public acquisition of disinformation status and their reception by target audiences shifts as they travel from one lingua-cultural environment to another
To shed light on how Russia's perceived role as a producer and disseminator of disinformation past and present should be understood within a comparative context, how these historically shaped perceptions continue to inform wider understandings of disinformation, and how they have been reshaped by Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine
To construct a pioneering model of collaborative knowledge generation in which academics, policy analysts and counter-disinformation practitioners tackle conceptual and methodological issues pertaining to the identification and countering of information-manipulation activities, and incorporating simulation models developed by Chatham House to test the efficacy of policy responses to disinformation in diverse local contexts
To help stakeholders support democratic integrity, information resilience and good governance, improving their appreciation of the importance of the different lingua-cultural and historical contexts in which disinformation is produced and consumed, their tools for detecting manipulated information and their understanding of the relationship between counter-disinformation theory and practice, thus ensuring a more reflexive and dynamic approach to the problems at stake
To offer career development opportunities to early career researchers by inducting them into the project's intellectual networks, providing opportunities for publications, impact work and training, and building capacity in Language-Based Area Studies, Communication Studies, and Cold War History
To produce a co-authored monograph, a series of refereed journal articles for academic beneficiaries in media studies, history, translation studies, area studies and medical humanities, and a REF Impact Case Study.
To produce reports, co-authored with policy community members, for our non-academic collaborators and partners, including the WHO, the FCO, OFCOM and DCMS, summarizing the relevance of our findings and proposing transformative new approaches to countering disinformation which will bolster UK information resilience and deepen policymakers' understanding of a key threat to UK security.
Principle Investigator
Stephen Hutchings is Professor of Russian Studies at the University of Manchester and Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences.
Lead Co-Investigator
Vera Tolz is Sir William Mather Professor of Russian Studies at the University of Manchester and Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences.
Co-Investigator
Neil Sadler is Associate Professor of Translation Studies, University of Leeds.
Co-Investigator
Sabina Mihelj is Professor of Media and Cultural Analysis at Loughborough University.
Co-Investigator
Dr Patricia Lewis is Research Director of Conflict, Science and Transformation and Director of the International Security Programme at Chatham House.
Co-Investigator
Rob Yates is the Executive Director of the Centre for Universal Health at Chatham House, and Director of its Global Health Programme.
Project Consultant
Nicolas Hénin is an experienced French author and journalist who has covered numerous conflicts in Africa and the Middle East.
Research Associate
Alexandr Voronovici is a project research associate at the University of Manchester.
Leverhulme Early-Career Postdoctoral Researcher, University of Manchester
Maxim joined the University of Manchester as a Leverhulme Early-Career Fellow in October 2023.
PhD Candidate
Under the supervision of Professors Stephen Hutchings and Vera Tolz at the University of Manchester, Maksim is carrying out research using a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods for a PhD project entitled: 'Transforming Meaning: Russian Trolls in Social Media’s Changing Linguistic Landscape'.
Postdoctoral researcher
Dr Natalie-Anne Hall is a postdoctoral research associate on the Everyday Misinformation Project at the Online Civic Culture Centre, Loughborough University.
The second part of a two-part blog post examining “sportswashing” as a form of disinformation, and reflecting on the role of audiences and the reception of “sportswashing” narratives.
Read MoreThe first part of Vitaly Kazakov's two-part blog post examining “sportswashing” as a form of disinformation, and reflecting on the role of audiences and the reception of “sportswashing” narratives.
Read MoreMaksim Markelov wins the third prize with the poster 'How do State Trolls Manipulate Online Discourse?'
Read MoreStephen Hutchings and Vera Tolz discuss our project in this video interview with Digital Futures network at the University of Manchester.
Read MoreIn her blog, Natalie-Anne Hall discusses the engagement of the pro-Brexit Facebook users with transnational right-wing populist discourses. The essay is based on Dr. Hall's recently published book 'Brexit, Facebook, and Transnational Right-Wing Populism' (Lexington Books, 2023).
Read MoreThis blog gives a handy overview of our project. It is published on 'The Russia Program' website at George Washington University and is available at: https://therussiaprogram.org/page37253323.html
Read MoreThis short article, authored by Stephen Hutchings, appeared in the Russia Program Journal. It outlines some of the key ideas and ambitions of our project.
The article is available at: https://online.flippingbook.com/view/65937120/6/
This article by Vera Tolz and Stephen Hutchings offers a qualitative analysis of how, by adopting identity-related discourses whose meanings resonate within a given culture, Russian state propaganda strives to bolster “the truth status” of its Ukraine war claims. These discourses, we argue, have long historical lineages and thus are expected to be familiar to audiences. We identify three such discourses common in many contexts but with specific resonances in Russia, those of colonialism/decolonization, imperialism, and the imaginary West. The article demonstrates that these same discourses also inform war-related coverage in Russophone oppositional media. Russian state-affiliated and oppositional actors further share “floating signifiers,” particularly “the Russian people,” “historical Russia,” “the Russian world,” “Ukraine,” “fascism/Nazism,” and “genocide,” while according them radically different meanings. Overall, our findings highlight the importance of studying how state propaganda works at the level of discourses, and the acutely dialogical processes by which disinformation and counter-disinformation efforts are produced and consumed.
Available via Open Access at:
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1060586X.2023.2202581
The book by Stephen Hutchings presents a new perspective on how Russia projects itself to the world. Distancing itself from familiar, agency-driven International Relations accounts that focus on what ‘the Kremlin’ is up to and why, it argues for the need to pay attention to deeper, trans-state processes over which the Kremlin exerts much less control. Especially important in this context is mediatization, defined as the process by which contemporary social and political practices adopt a media form and follow media-driven logics. In particular, the book emphasizes the logic of the feedback loop or ‘recursion’, showing how it drives multiple Russian performances of national belonging and nation projection in the digital era. It applies this theory to recent issues, events, and scandals that have played out in international arenas ranging from television, through theatre, film, and performance art, to warfare. The first three chapters relate directly to disinformation.
For further details, see: https://www.routledge.com/Projecting-Russia-in-a-Mediatized-World-Recursive-Nationhood/Hutchings/p/book/9780367263904
This book is now available via Open Access at: https://www.routledge.com/Projecting-Russia-in-a-Mediatized-World-Recursive-Nationhood/Hutchings/p/book/9781032201221#
This short introductory piece, authored by Stephen Hutchings and Vera Tolz, appeared on the Modern Languages Research Blog hosted by the Institute for Advanced Study in London on October 6, 2021. It is available at: https://modernlanguagesresearch.blogs.sas.ac.uk/2021/10/06/mistranslating-deceit-disinformations-hidden-translingual-journey/
This brief introduction to the history of uses of the term, disinformation, was authored by Vera Tolz and Stephen Hutchings. It appeared on the LSE Politics Blog (Media@LSE Blog) on 10 August, 2021. It is available at: https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/medialse/2021/10/08/performing-disinformation-a-muddled-history-and-its-consequences/
With the rise and rise of social media, today’s communication practices are significantly different from those of even the recent past. A key change has been a shift to very small units, exemplified by Twitter and its strict 280-character limit on individual posts. Consequently, highly fragmented communication has become the norm in many contexts. In his book Neil Sadler sets out to explore the production and reception of fragmentary stories, analysing the Twitter-based narrative practices of Donald Trump, the Spanish political movement Podemos, and Egyptian activists writing in the context of the 2013 military intervention in Egypt. Sadler draws on narrative theory and hermeneutics to argue that narrative remains a vital means for understanding, allowing fragmentary content to be grasped together as part of significant wholes.
For further details see: https://www.routledge.com/Fragmented-Narrative-Telling-and-Interpreting-Stories-in-the-Twitter-Age/Sadler/p/book/9781032036762
Our project will generate various datasets relating to our work on disinformation. These may be of use to other researchers
We are planning to co-produce various short reports summarising our findings, but aimed at the policy-making community and/or a wider general audience. They are available here.
We hope to make available links to online media resources relevant to our research interests. They will be found here
Over the course of our project we will build an extensive bibliography capturing other useful research items dealing with those aspects of disinformation of interest to us. It will be available here
