Introduction

Abstract

The bulk of this issue of Laboratorium consists of the articles that were originally submitted to the journal’s second competition for young scholars. (The first such contest took place in 2012, and the articles by some of the winners and finalists were published in issue no. 2, 2012.) During the current competition, which was open from August through November 2015, we received about 60 submissions by authors from Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Georgia, Ukraine, Estonia, Hungary, India, Germany, Great Britain, and the United States. The manuscripts represented a variety of disciplines in the social sciences and humanities—including political sociology and the sociology of organizations, gender and migration studies, research in ethnicity and nationalism, history, death studies, and cultural anthropology—and, as a result, covered a wide range of topics and methodological approaches. This diversity of submissions was impressive and encouraging. It once again confirmed that the journal is recognized as a multidisciplinary platform for qualitative scholarship in the social sciences broadly conceived. The geography of submissions—internationally as well as within Russia—also testifies to a certain success of Laboratorium’s other objective: to facilitate scholarly dialogue among scholars from different parts of the world and to internationalize scholarship by showcasing social research that is conducted by scholars across the world.