Ekaterina // Through the years, we were never professional journalists. Nobody of us started as journalists. We were all social scientists who just gained this experience by working and becoming the journalists. At first we were laughing, because people were saying, “these are activists”, and we're like, “no, we are also journalists!”
This is Ekaterina from DOXA, one of the few active independent media platforms that originated in Russia. She joined DOXA when it was a small university collective.
Ekaterina // I joined DOXA when I was 18. So the first month of my studies I was like, “this is a really cool lefty publication. I want to do something there.” From the very beginning I felt how much these people and the community around was looking for, I think, the agency and for this critiques that were lacking in the public space around. When you are a student you're really afraid of everything, and you're kind of more like looking for advising you look for professors who would be helping you. In Russia, there is not really like a place where you can be criticizing what is happening.
DOXA created a rare space for discourse of contemporary societal issues, from decriminalizing sex work to history of Kurdish resistance. Such storytelling has subjected the platform to extreme harassment and persecution in Russia.
Ekaterina // In this world, right now, it's really hard to distinguish what is activism and what is journalism. Especially if you're coming from an authoritarian country and you want to deliver the information. This is already a sort of activist because you are forbidden inside of your country. You have to kind of break the law by publishing this content illegally. You have to deliver this content, and still have some standards.
In 2022, many of DOXA’s members were forced to flee their home, but the collective persisted- and continues to elevate the standards of progressive journalism.
Ekaterina // We all believe very deep in our hearts, that Russian journalism lacks this lefty and engaged platform for the young people. This sounds like, “okay, yeah, there is no big lefty medias and you could be this”, but for us is also about being presented and being included in the public discourse. To allow for the discourse to be changed, because we see how even being in exile is changing people, and there are more and more conflicts and disagreements.
Today, we’re going to explore how the resilience of a university journal blossomed into a global progressive media platform.
Ekaterina // The founder of the DOXA, Arman Araman, he thought that as any philosopher student it would be cool to take a Greek name that's why we are named as DOXA. From Greek, it's “an opinion”. Our initial idea was also to be like okay we want to have an opinion, because in Russian students don't have any opinion, usually, represented in any media and inside of the university.
A year before DOXA was founded, most of the Russian journalists reported that they do not feel free and independent. At least 4 journalists would be murdered in Russia that year.
Ekaterina // DOXA started as a student organization in 2017 when the group of students in philosophy department was studying in B.A. in the Higher School of Economics. there was a very liberal and very… well, to say “liberal”, it's a bit different in US and in Russia. For us it meant that it was a more free space where you could do your thesises and school work about kind of forbidden topics. And in general, there would be less of academic censorship.
DOXA reports on complex topics, from propaganda of militarism in Russian kindergartens to worker union uprisings in Argentina. But the platform’s origins were humble.
Ekaterina // ****In this university we started as publication that wanted to highlight the problems that students face in Russia. first of all gender problems such as sexual harassment gender discrimination and then the corruption in Russian universities. So we started to be very vocal and one of the first materials were “Top 10 Worst Courses” in our philosophy department.
Ekaterina // We started to do investigations on the sexual harassment in our university. This led to, first of all, a huge public disapproval of the harassment and the attempt of our university to change the policies and create anti-harassment policies (which was also very problematic because that we were seen as kind of доносчики, which means that we are reporting something bad. But in that moment we felt that, “okay, our publication really leads to some changes, and that's what we want to do”.
DOXA was empowered, rather than discouraged by the pushback the platform received from University officials.