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Mrs Olga Solovyeva

Profile summary

  • Research Student
  • Research Student
  • The Faculty of Business & Law
  • The Open University Business School
  • Undergraduate & Professional Development
  • olga.solovyeva

Professional biography

I am a social researcher with experience in higher education, business and civil society organisations. My BA was in Political Science and my MA in Communications, both obtained at the Higher School of Economics. Primary areas of my expertise include communication, technology and society. I have developed and taught courses on research design, strategic communication and media theory in-person and online. 

Research interests

My PhD research explores the relationship between the IT business and an authoritarian state, in the case of Yandex, a multinational IT company with HQ in Russia. In this work, I discuss the issues of political CSR and its limitations in illiberal contexts. I also focus on the organisational implications of state-business relationships and how employees make sense of it.   

Previously I have written about the effects of emerging technologies on society, covering online dating, online learning, social media and disinformation. 

 

Academic publications

Solovyeva, O. (2017) Communicative Ecology of Moscow Residents: Mapping Major Patterns Among the Young Dwellers. Urban Studies and Practices. Vol 2(3).

Solovyeva, O., Logunova, O. (2018) Self-Presentation Strategies in Online Dating: the Case of Tinder in Moscow. In D. A. Alexandrov et al. (Eds.): DTGS 2018, CCIS 858, pp. 1–9, 2019.

Savin, N., Solovyeva, O. (2020) Social media and Russian society. In Strategic Communications in Russia (pp. 167- 176). Routledge.

Veryaeva, K., Solovyeva, O. (2021) The Influence of Gamification and Platform Affordances on User Engagement in Online Learning. International Journal of Distance Education Technologies (IJDET), 19(1), 1-17. DOI: 10.4018/IJDET.2021010101

Solovyeva, O., & Laskin, A. V. (2022). Gamification, Tinder Effect, and Tinder Fatigue: Dating as a CMC Experience. In The Emerald Handbook of Computer-Mediated Communication and Social Media(pp. 197-211). Emerald Publishing Limited. DOI: 10.1108/978-1-80071-597-420221012

Non-fiction

Solovyeva O., Tkalenko D. (2021) The practice of Internet dating. AST (In Rusian)

Solovyeva, O. (2022) Swipe. An essay in Difficult feelings: a dictionary for new reality (edited by Polina Aronson) Individuum (In Rusian)

Impact and engagement

In collaboration with Global Voices, an international community of digital activists, I worked on an Unfreedom Monitor project. Unfreedom monitor explores how digital technology empowers illiberal regimes worldwide. The full report can be found here. 

For this project, I've written a couple of pieces about the place of information technology in digital authoritarianism worldwide:

Unfreedom Monitor Report: Information

Disinformation 2.0: Should we bring the notion of propaganda back into public discourse?

Keeping fakes under control: how legislation on disinformation turns into a censorship tool

Publications

Putin’s Technological Deluge: Techno-Populism, Anti-Westernism, and the Strive for Global Leadership (2024)
Solovyeva, Olga and Yablokov, Ilya
Communist and Post-Communist Studies ((Early Access))

Business beyond politics? A-political corporate leadership in authoritarian Russia (2024)
Solovyeva, Olga and Bristow, Alexandra
In: Knights, David; Liu, Helena; Smolović-Jones, Owain and Wilson, Suze eds. The Routledge Critical Companion to Leadership Studies. Routledge Companions in Business and Management
ISBN : 9781032425153 | Publisher : Routledge | Published : New York, USA and Oxon, UK

Mr. Putin's Fantasy (2021)
Solovyeva, Olga
Postgraduate Research Poster Competition, The Open University