Visiting Scholars
Aikerim Altaikyzy holds a Ph.D. in Religious Studies and is a Research Fellow at the Institute of Philosophy, Political Science, and Religious Studies under the Science Committee of the Republic of Kazakhstan. She has participated in collaborative research teams in the fields of Islamic and religious studies and has also led a three-year research project examining the influence of Islamic values on the formation of ecological consciousness and culture. Her academic interests include Islam in Central Asia, the relationship between Islamic and secular values in Kazakhstan, and religious education.
As a Visiting Scholar at Stanford University’s Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies (CREEES), Altaikyzy is focusing on the role of Islam in shaping identity in post-Soviet Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. Through this appointment, she aims to gain high-level international research experience, further develop her professional skills, and study the scholarly work of American academics in her field.
My project investigates how disinformation is framed as a security threat in articles published in Estonian mainstream media, with the aim of advancing a semiotically informed understanding of securitization as a culturally and historically grounded process. As a NATO border state with a traumatic history of Soviet information control and a strong contemporary identity built around digital innovation, Estonia offers a particularly compelling case. The study draws on the Copenhagen school of security studies and semiotic analysis of e-threats to highlight the dominant rhetorical strategies, including the frequent use of war metaphors, affective amplification, and the personalization of threats. It also explores how references to Soviet propaganda and dystopian narratives from popular culture are mobilized to deepen the sense of urgency and legitimize extraordinary countermeasures. By critically examining these discursive patterns, the research sheds light on the broader dynamics of information securitization and reveals how the framing of threats can significantly influence collective perceptions of ontological (in)security, potentially reinforcing a persistent climate of distrust.
In addition to this research, I plan to use my time at Stanford to introduce the distinctiveness and potential of the cultural semiotic approach in the study of political communication. Developed under relatively peripheral conditions, cultural semiotics is well known among European humanities scholars, particularly in literary studies, but has received undeservedly limited attention in the broader global academic community. I aim to share my research that demonstrates the explanatory power of this approach in the fields of international relations and communication studies—particularly its applicability to the analysis of malign information-influence activities and meaning-making processes shaped by fear.
Mari-Liis Madisson is a cultural semiotician who works as a research fellow at the department of semiotics, University of Tartu. She is the principal investigator for the Baltic work package in the international research project Researching Europe, Digitalisation, and Conspiracy Theories (CHANSE-41). Her research lies at the intersection of critical security studies, cultural analysis, and strategic narrative theory. Focusing on the Baltic region, she explores how threats are discursively constructed under conditions of fear and uncertainty, and how collective meaning-making frameworks shape societal responses to hybrid challenges. Her work has been published in internationally recognised peer-reviewed journals, including Semiotica, Problems of Post-Communism, Media, War & Conflict, and European Security. She is the co-author of two monographs—Varjatud märgid ja salaühingud: vandenõuteooriate tähendusmaailm (Postimees, 2023) and Strategic Conspiracy Narratives: A Semiotic Approach (Routledge, 2021)—and co-editor of the forthcoming volume Through the Lens of Dread: Exploring the Meaning-Making of Fear in the Mediasphere (Tallinn University Press, 2025). Photo by Kerttu Kruusla.
Estonians have experienced numerous waves of migration: some voluntary and others forced. From a macro perspective, those instances provide a telling vantage point onto the history of both nation and state. From a micro perspective, they encompass a plethora of poignant revelations about the human condition. While there are informative case studies, there does not yet exist a monograph which would encompass the totality of these migrations. With launching my ambitious monograph project I aim to do just that: span centuries and include the whole world. While at Stanford, I will be zooming in on the international connections pertaining to Estonian individuals and communities abroad in the 19th century and early 20th century until World War II.
Maarja Merivoo-Parro is dedicated to exploring the history of mentality at the crossroads of culture and politics and has extensive field work experience among Estonian communities from Abkhazia to Australia. She is a Fulbright scholar and currently holds the position of Marie Curie fellow at the University of Jyväskylä in Finland. Maarja has received national recognition for her work as a public intellectual bridging academia and society through documentary films, television and radio programs.
Nina Tumarkin is Kathryn Wasserman Davis Professor of Slavic Studies, Professor of History and Director of the Russian Area Studies Program at Wellesley College, and Center Associate at the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard University. Her current book project on the politics of the past in Putin’s Russia builds on her previous books, The Living and the Dead: The Rise and Fall of the Cult of World War II in Russia (Basic Books) and Lenin Lives! The Lenin Cult in Soviet Russia (Harvard University Press). Her past career has also included the role of advisor to President Ronald Reagan, for whom she wrote two invited papers and served as one of six Soviet experts who briefed the President, Vice-President, and key cabinet members on the eve of Mr. Reagan’s historic first meeting with Mikhail Gorbachev in November 1985 at the Geneva Summit. In 1995 President Bill Clinton read Professor Tumarkin’s book, The Living and the Dead, in preparation for his Victory Day visit to Moscow.
My current research project explores the legacy of the Soviet past in Putin’s Russia. I focus on the elusive and checkered fate of Lenin, and the far more consequential and robust legacy of Stalin, whose popularity and reputation have consistently risen in the past dozen years. And I am investigating the official use and misuse of the history of the Great Patriotic War, partly, but not wholly, in the framework of the Russo-Ukrainian War. In the absence of an ideology that had purported to legitimize Soviet policy, history has come to replace ideology as the Russian regime’s prime source of legitimacy. President Vladimir Putin, in particular, has appealed to Russia’s history—or rather, to a pastiche of idealized historical narratives, some of which go back more than a thousand years—to justify many of his actions and policies. Putin’s appeal to history forms only a part of my project’s purview, which also explores the actions and views of people from many social sectors, plus significant historical memory products; these include battle reenactors, searchers for remains of the war dead, monuments and museums, debates over the fate of Lenin’s body, Lenin and Stalin memes, and public commemorations of historical events. I will contextualize my material in a framework of recent, current, and Cold War era propaganda and media.
My research builds on political semiotics and currently centers on the semiotic analysis of anti-Estonian influence operations—how states and political actors shape public perception, frame conflicts, and promote identity narratives. During my visit to Stanford University, I aim to refine my new research agenda, the semiotics of deterrence which explores how deterrence strategies rely on audience perception and emotional credibility. In the context of current global tensions, such as the war in Ukraine and the U.S.–China rivalry, understanding the communicative power of deterrence is more critical than ever.
In my current project, I focus on Russian and Chinese influence operations in NATO member states, especially in the Baltic region. I examine how recent political developments have shaped deterrence strategies and how different actors define security. To explore this, I use the concept of strategic culture—shared beliefs shaped by historical experience—and approach it through the lens of strategic communication.
By applying cultural semiotics, I analyze how meaning-making processes differ across strategic cultures as a part of cultures and how these are used to build persuasive strategic narratives. This approach, which I call the semiotics of deterrence, helps identify the textual, verbal, and visual strategies behind deterrence efforts and reveals how these resonate with specific audiences. The goal is to support the development of more culturally informed and effective counter-strategies to resist hostile influence operations.
Andreas Ventsel is Professor of Political and Sociosemiotics at the University of Tartu. His interdisciplinary research encompasses semiotics, discourse theory, visual communication, security studies, and political analysis. He has published extensively in leading academic journals, including Media, War & Conflict, European Security, Armed Forces & Society, Europe-Asia Studies, and Theory, Culture & Society. Ventsel is the co-author of several books, such as Strategic Conspiracy Narratives: A Semiotic Approach (Routledge, 2021, with Mari-Liis Madisson, University of Tartu), Introducing Relational Political Analysis: Political Semiotics as a Theory and Method (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021, with Peeter Selg, Tallinn University), and Varjatud märgid ja salaühingud: Vandenõuteooriate tähendusmaailm (Postimees Kirjastus, 2023, with Mari-Liis Madisson and Mihhail Lotman). He is also the editor of Power of Emotions: On the Affective Constitution of Political Struggle. A Multidisciplinary Approach (Springer, 2025, with Peeter Selg).
Currently, Ventsel is the principal investigator of the Estonian Research Council grant PRG 1716, “Relational Approach to Strategic History Narratives,” and leads the project “Strategic Communication in the Context of the War in Ukraine: Lessons Learned for Estonia,” supported by the Estonian Defence Forces. Photo by Kerttu Kruusla.