Natalia Roudakova

I am a cultural anthropologist working in the field of political communication and comparative media studies. I also have a broad interest in moral philosophy and political and cultural theory. I was educated in both the Soviet Union and the United States (Ph.D. in Cultural and Social Anthropology, Stanford University, 2007). From 2008 to 2017, I worked as an Assistant Professor at the Department of Communication, University of California in San Diego, USA. 

My research in communication has been located at the intersection of journalism studies, classic social theory, and philosophy of communication, with a particular focus on questions of media and ethics. I have been especially interested in the political role journalism plays during revolutions and more gradual political transitions, when – as an institution – it works simultaneously as an agent and a target of political and social change.

I have conducted long-term ethnographic fieldwork among journalists across Russia in both print and broadcast outlets. I have also compared journalists’ roles during political transitions in Russia, China, and Venezuela.

At the University of California, I taught courses on the history and philosophy of communication, on research methods and design, and more general courses on notions of freedom and on the relationship between media and good life. In 2013-2014, I spent a year as a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences in Palo Alto, California, where I completed my book manuscript (now out with Cambridge University Press), titled "Losing Pravda: Ethics and the Press in Post-Truth Russia."

Losing Pravda examines the spectacular professional unraveling of journalism in Russia during the 1990s and 2000s and its broader social and cultural effects. I argue that a crisis of journalism is unlike any other: it fundamentally erodes the value of truth-seeking and truth-telling in a society.

In many ways, I track how a post-truth society comes into being. Russia’s case thus becomes far from unique, illuminating instead the historical and cultural emergence of phenomena such as “fake news,” misinformation (kompromat), and general distrust in politics and public life that have now begun to plague Western democracies as well. My account of one country’s loss of the culture of truth-seeking can serve as an important “wake-up call” for Western nations going forward.