This two-day event featured leading Russian journalists and media experts Maria Lipman, Andrey Soldatov, Mikhail Fishman, Anna Sharogradskaya, Aleksander Gorbachev, and Sergey Parkhomenko and US-based scholars Sarah Oates and Marlene LaRuelle. 

Workshop papers explored the discussions that are posible through digital media, social media, alternative media outlets, and other forms of civic and cultural venues inculding museums, art exhibits, and performance.  This approach to understanding media in contemporary autocracy stresses how alternative narratives are constructed, where they are located in the social and civic space, and how they operate in an increasingly inauspicious environment.

Workshop Program