The phenomenon of industrial provinces is of particular interest for cultural analysis, since the realities of post-industrial society devalue the images of progress generated by the industrial era. The devaluation leads to a systemic crisis of cultural meanings that have shaped the region’s image and its inhabitants’ cultural self-identification. The study aims at discovering cultural representation features of mining regions’ historical heritage. The paper analyzes the role of industrial images in the modern culture, investigates how the industrial heritage is being exploited, examines how regional cultural identity has been built throughout the Russian industrial provinces’ development, and singles out some stereotyped images and discursive models. The research is based on local history literature, mass media publications, museum collections, and private interviews. A comprehensive cultural approach based on the methodological principles of the semiotics of culture and discursive analysis is used to interpret the collected materials.
The article considers the trending concept of edutainment (a portmanteau of ‘education’ and ‘entertainment’), and studies the socio-cultural factors that have helped to spread such educational methods. The author demonstrates the concept’s relevance to teaching cultural studies at non-humanities universities; exemplifies it through her own experience of applying edutainment to coaching students’ research of the cultural heritage; describes the methodology of the educational experiment; and assesses its theoretical and practical results.
The article explores social and cultural context of historical development of the theory of gastronomy and the practices of gourmet cuisine. This process is interpreted as an effect of the cultural ideology based upon humanistic rhetoric, ideals of progress and aesthetic transformation of pleasure experience.
The ongoing reform of higher education in Russia requires finding new approaches to syllabus planning, new ways to manage and supervise students’ individual academic activities. Humanities are not limited to information transfer, they aim at developing students’ analytic abilities as well. Thus, the interaction between students and teachers becomes of utmost importance. The reform allows increasing the share of extramural activities, which creates a challenge of preserving interactivity. In the article, the author has considered cutting-edge interactive communication technologies that can help teachers coordinate students’ extramural studies and encourage their epistemic curiosity they need to absorb humanities.
The article contains an overview of communicative realities corresponding to the present state of culture and society. Modern culture is marked with noticeable predominance of subject-to-object relationships, indicative for consumer society. Since consuming strategies are decisive for socio-cultural identification, it seems reasonable to enrich the thesaurus of culture studies with material of marketing investigations that describe a variety of human activities in terms of consumption of goods and services as well as emotions, cultural values, ideas etc. As a particular case of this promising tendency we may regard principals of efficient communication elaborated in terms of marketing and insistently spread over a wide field of cultural interactions.
