Featured roundtable (Sociology)

“New Russian Sociology”

Participants:

Maksim Alyukov, University of Tyumen

Vladimir Magun, RAS Institute of Sociology

Anna Temkina, European University at St. Petersburg

 

Moderator:

Greg Yudin, HSE Moscow / Moscow School of Social and Economic Sciences

Time: Monday, 11 June, 14:30-16:15, room 214

The purpose of this plenary roundtable is to offer a diverse range of analytical perspectives on contemporary Russian society and its values, beliefs and opinions. The participants will assess recent political and social trends, as well as methodologies used in sociological research. It is often claimed that Russians are predisposed to support authoritarian leaders. This necessitates in-depth research on the values held by different population groups in Russia, while the results must be analysed in a comparative international context. The coming of age of the ‘Putin Generation’ – youth born in the 2000s who have only known Vladimir Putin as Russia’s leader – offers a new spectrum of empirical challenges. Given the promotion of ‘traditional values’ by the state, examining the evolution of family, childhood and reproductive practices could provide important insights in the nature of state-society relations. Speaking more broadly, public opinion formation depends on the development of political communication and the media. Representation (and underrepresentation) of different social groups and sectors of Russian society is a problem that requires not just empirical research, but also theoretical reflection. Finally, it is imperative that sociologists critically reflect on their own assumptions and methods: for instance, opinion polls are an invaluable source of data, but excessive reliance on this tool creates a range of problems, which highlights the importance of methodological and theoretical pluralism. While the participants of the roundtable represent different trends in contemporary Russian sociology, all of them have first-hand knowledge of how Russian society works and will also discuss what needs to be done to enhance our understanding of societal developments.

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Maxim Alyukov is a researcher and instructor at the School of Advanced Studies, University of Tyumen; a researcher at the Centre for Independent Social Research’s Public Sociology Laboratory, St. Petersburg; and a PhD Candidate at the Department of Political Science and Sociology at European University, St. Petersburg. His research interests are mostly related to media studies and political communication. Currently, Maxim is finishing his PhD dissertation dealing with Russian TV and media effects at EUSP, as well as participating in the “Work, Politics, and Private Life in the Age of Global Crisis: Thinking and Decision-Making under Neoliberalism” cohort at the University of Tyumen. He is also working on a number of projects on civil society, protest movements and war in the post-communist world at the Public Sociology Laboratory.

 

Vladimir Magun, Ph.D., is Head of the Laboratory for Comparative Studies of Mass Consciousness at the National Research University Higher School of Economics and Head of the Department for Personality Research at the Institute of Sociology of the Federal Center for Theoretical and Applied Sociology at the Russian Academy of Sciences. He received his Ph.D. from Saint-Petersburg State University. Magun has published on the revolution of aspirations of Russian and Ukrainian youth, dynamics and cross-country comparisons of Russian work values, comparative study of Russian basic values and identities, and bureaucracy issues. His most recent publications, coauthored with Maksim Rudnev, Marharyta Fabrykant and Peter Schmidt, concern the value typology of Europeans and post-Soviet dynamics of Russian values and identities. In 2006-2012, Magun served as a member of the Scientific Advisory Board of the European Social Survey. 

Anna Temkina, Ph.D., is the Chair in Public Health and Gender, co-director of the Gender Programme at the European University at St. Petersburg. Her research includes gender studies and feminism began in 1990es. She has worked on  reproductive health, sexuality, and gender relations in Soviet and Post-Soviet societies. She is the author Women’s Sexual Life: between Freedom and Subordination (2008),  Russia in transition (1997; in English). She is the co-author and co-editor of In search of sexuality (2002), New byt: gender studies of everyday life (2009), Health and Trust:  Gender Approach to Reproductive Medicine (2009),  Health and  Intimate life (2011), 12 Lectures in Gender Sociology (2015).

Greg Yudin, a social and political scientist, is Senior Researcher in Laboratory for Studies in Economic Sociology at the Higher School of Economics and co-head of the MA program in Political Philosophy at Moscow School of Social and Economic Sciences. Yudin studied sociology, philosophy and politics at the HSE, University of Manchester, and New School for Social Research in New York. In 2012, he defended his PhD-dissertation in Philosophy at HSE. His papers have been published in the leading international and Russian peer-reviewed journals in philosophy, sociology, and anthropology. He is a regular columnist for the Russian newspaper Vedomosti and the online edition of Republic.