Roman Horbyk
Roman Horbyk was born in Kyiv, Ukraine. He accomplished his BA and MA degrees with majors in Journalism at Kyiv National Taras Shevchenko University. Roman received an international Master's degree in "Journalism and Media within Globalisation: a European Perspective" in 2012 with a joint certificate from Universities of Aarhus and Hamburg, having also studied in Amsterdam and completed courses from UC Berkeley. In 2015, he defended his Candidate of Sciences dissertation in Media History at Kyiv National Taras Shevchenko University, and in 2017, a PhD dissertation in Media and Communication Studies at Södertörn University in Stockholm. Since then, he worked as a postdoctoral fellow at Umeå University and Södertörn University in Sweden, with projects on fake news as narratives and on the use of modern communication technology at the East Ukrainian frontline.
As a researcher, he is primarily interested in how the media functions within power relations; other topics of interest include postcolonial theory as well as media history, particularly in relation to the popular genres in the 1920s and 1930s. Roman has also extensively worked as a print and TV journalist with a 10-year career. His reports and columns were published in Ukraine, Germany, Brazil, and Denmark.
Roman Horbyk speaks Ukrainian, English, German, Polish, and Russian fluently.
Supervisors: Prof. Johan Fornäs, Prof. Nataliya Sydorenko, Prof. Irene Neverla, Prof. Uwe Hasebrink, and Prof. Ivan Megela
As a researcher, he is primarily interested in how the media functions within power relations; other topics of interest include postcolonial theory as well as media history, particularly in relation to the popular genres in the 1920s and 1930s. Roman has also extensively worked as a print and TV journalist with a 10-year career. His reports and columns were published in Ukraine, Germany, Brazil, and Denmark.
Roman Horbyk speaks Ukrainian, English, German, Polish, and Russian fluently.
Supervisors: Prof. Johan Fornäs, Prof. Nataliya Sydorenko, Prof. Irene Neverla, Prof. Uwe Hasebrink, and Prof. Ivan Megela
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The material is examined from the following vantage points: Michel Foucault’s discursive theory of power, postcolonial theory, Jürgen Habermas’s theory of the public sphere, Pierre Bourdieu’s field theory, Jacques Derrida’s hauntology and Ernesto Laclau’s concept of the empty signifier. The methods of analysis include conceptual history (Reinhart Koselleck), critical linguistics and qualitative discourse analysis (a discourse-historical approach inspired by the Vienna school) and quantitative content analysis (in Klaus Krippendorff’s interpretation).
Historically, the national narratives of Europe in the aforementioned three countries are characterised by dependence on the West that also sparks periods of its rejection. These narratives vacillate between three major poles: idealising admiration, materialist pragmatics and geopolitical demonising. They are not exclusively endemic to one country and have been present in each to some extent. However, weaker actors have tended to lean towards the idealist side because Europe is perceived as a source of important technological and social know-how. Authors in all three countries struggled with defining Europe’s limits, and whilst this problem be- came intertwined with their own identification, Europeanness is typically constructed as a shock wave fading as it travels eastward from an epicentre located somewhere in north-western Europe.
These discourses were reactivated and developed in 2013–2014. In the analysed newspapers, Europe is often understood as a continent (most often in Poland) or identified with the EU (Russia and Ukraine), but there is also a strong pattern of using Europe in reference to values which is weakest in Poland and strongest in Ukraine. Ideologically, the liberal publications in all three countries focus on positive values, whereas the conservative and business newspapers are preoccupied with negative values. Among the posi- tive values, the humanistic ones dominate the Ukrainian newspapers, and the rationalist-technocratic are typical in the Russian sample. The Ukrainian press account for most of the positive coverage of a successful Europe, whereas the Russian press provide most of the negative coverage (Europe as a failing entity and an enemy). Ukrainian and Russian discourses differ sharply on whether the country should adopt European reforms (Ukraine) or not (Russia). The Polish coverage is polarised between positive and negative values.
During and after Euromaidan, Ukrainian journalists used the powerful Europe-as-values concept to actively intervene in the political field and re- contextualise this narrative of Europe as the official foreign policy narrative. This was enabled, paradoxically, by weak professionalism that made a wavering from a neutral stance possible. Compared to this, in Russia the strong discourse on journalist objectivity constrained journalists in their social practice; rather, it is the official discourse that is recontextualised by the media. Polish journalists, ambiguous about their own influence, work in a loop that recontextualises discourses from the media sphere to the political field and vice versa.