"I'm hoping for creativity and curiosity" - Dr Nataliia Steblyna teaches at the Viadrina as the first KIU guest professor

Mrs Steblyna, why did you apply for the guest professorship at the Viadrina?

It was not an easy decision for me to leave my country and my university. At the same time, however, it also offers a great opportunity. As far as I know, the Viadrina is interested in Ukraine and its students are interested in Ukrainian culture, politics and media. Of course, I would like to share my experience and knowledge.

I am also interested in familiarising myself with the German higher education system. In Ukraine, the higher education system has been in crisis since the war: students are distracted while watching the news. Others have to find a job to finance their studies. I think my work at the Viadrina will inspire me to learn more about new teaching methods. After my guest stay at the Viadrina, my university could cooperate with the Viadrina and my students with Viadrina students.

You are a professor at Vasyl Stus University and also lead the school on behalf of the actual director, who has joined the Ukrainian army. What kind of university is it?

My university is actually the Vasyl Stus Donetsk National University, but at the moment it has migrated to another location. There are currently two Donetsk universities, one pro-Russian on the ground with some of the staff who have decided to co-operate with the Russian occupiers. Another part of the staff left Donetsk in 2014 and moved to Kyiv and Vinnytsia. In autumn 2014, they decided to resume their teaching activities. That was not easy. It was not taken seriously that you could get a good education at a migrant university. You need a building; you need classes, technical equipment and teachers. But my colleagues have overcome all these difficulties; I am very proud to have been part of this university since 2019. I have been working in Vinnytsia for five years now.

What is the university's current situation?

My colleagues from eastern Ukraine have experienced the war since 2014, so they were able to help us reorganise the education system and teach online in February 2022. We are not a large university; we have around 3,000 students and six faculties.

What can Viadrina students expect from you as a visiting professor?

My first course deals with digital data analysis, simply to explain how analysing texts with a computer works. The Master's students will benefit from analysing large amounts of data as they prepare for their degree. I will teach them the basics. Without having to have prior knowledge of coding, Styblex and other tools, they will achieve interesting results while analysing, visualising and interpreting data.

The second course is about propaganda. Propaganda changes the way we think. It influences people, such as Donald Trump, who is also the target of Russian propaganda. So it's not just about how you can recognise propaganda, but what you can do with this knowledge, including for the period of reconstruction after this information war.

My third course deals with crisis communication, i.e. how to communicate during war or other crises. I will explain this using the example of Ukraine.

And what do you expect from your students?

I 'm hoping for creativity and curiosity above all; that is extremely important to me. And I expect the students to be interested. They don't need to know a lot about Ukraine, they just need to be interested in these topics. And, of course, I also expect students to do their homework and write essays for which they do not use artificial intelligence.

You are now a media researcher specialising in propaganda, conflict journalism and computer analysis. How did you acquire this expertise?

After studying journalism, I was initially employed by a Ukrainian newspaper. So I started my career as a journalist and to this day it is very important to me to understand professional standards, to fulfil the obligation to tell the truth - to paint the whole picture. But it was not easy to be a journalist in Ukraine. So I decided to do a Ph.D. programme at the University of Odesa; my doctoral thesis also dealt with journalism. I wanted to use more quantitative approaches. In 2019, I got the opportunity to apply for a postdoctoral position at Stus University, so I was able to start the course on computer analysis with this postdoctoral programme; I had time to grasp coding, study Python and work with different programmes. It was extremely exciting to use computer programmes to analyse millions of texts from Ukrainian, Russian and Belarusian media and to build all these crazy models that I love so much. So the current Viadrina course on computer analysis has its origins in my postdoctoral research.

As a media scientist, in addition to my work at the university, I have been cooperating with a Ukrainian NGO, the Pylyp Orlyk Institute for Democracy, since 2015. We analyse regional professional magazines and online media as well as non-professional forums such as Telegram. Our research is dedicated to manipulation and Russian propaganda. We have seen a lot because of the Russian information war. Russian operations on the ground are always linked to information operations. So you can recognise and interpret that. I hope to show students how to interpret data, how to see all these manipulations and, of course, how to protect themselves from harm.

What personal interests do you have beyond research and teaching?

I am a hobby musician; here in Ukraine I am a member of a rock band with other people from my university. In the past five years, we've only had a few rehearsals together. After 2022, we realised that our people need information, media and all that, but they also need music. So we recorded several songs and played several gigs in front of volunteers, the Ukrainian army or just in the pub where people drink beer. I play accordion, harmonica and bass guitar. So I'm a musician, I enjoy rock concerts, but also classical music. It would be great to listen to Bach in Germany.

Translated by Deepl and edited