Astrakhan State University Presents Its Media Project in St. Petersburg

For the 13th year in a row, the State Hermitage Museum has been inviting mass media from every corner of the world: early November traditionally sees the international media forum of young journalists «Dialogue of Cultures». This year, the event has been attended, among others, by representatives of the ASU Faculty of Philology & Journalism.

The media forum topic was «New Forms of Dialogue in Digital and Social Media». 400 representatives of mass media from 35 countries and throughout Russia gathered in the Hermitage Museum to discuss possibilities and ways of promoting journalistic works in the modern cyberspace.

According to Ashot Dzhazoyan, the forum organizer and mastermind who is the Secretary of the Union of Journalists of Russia, the media forum has become a national platform for exchange of media experience of people from different countries.

The representatives of Astrakhan State University participated in the section «Cross-Border Multimedia Projects» with their «Caspian Musical Clusters Guide». The initiative aims at developing cooperation between leading theatres of the Caspian states in order to hold the Caspian Opera Festival, an open-air joint theatre event, at the Astrakhan State Theatre of Opera and Ballet.

The student project, developed under the guidance of Galina Belolipskaya, the Head of the ASU Department of Theory & History of Journalism, is quite well-timed and urgent also because of the signing of the Convention on the legal status of the Caspian Sea by the Caspian states — Azerbaijan, Iran, Kazakhstan, Russia and Turkmenistan — in 2018. The Astrakhan students’ cross-border project considers this cooperation in the context of cultural relationship. The guide is meant to form a common cultural space of the Caspian Sea region, extend artistic cooperation and engage new viewership to the region.