Announcements

Call for paper for a special issue on "Sacral Spaces of Memory: Orthodox Art and Memorial Practices in Contemporary Russia"

Guest editors of the special issue:

Olga Rusinova and Tatiana Voronina

In the current academic literature, religious practices are approached either from the perspective of memory studies or as part of theological discourse. Authors who have studied modern religious ways of dealing with the past have written about forms of commemoration, church rituals, their meaning, and events that leave their mark on church calendars and memorial practices; or have considered the Russian Orthodox Church as an agent of memory.


Read More


Call for paper for a special issue on "Reconceptualizing Academic Freedom: Perspectives from Inside and Out"

Guest editors: Кaterina Guba, EUSP, and Dmitry Dubrovsky, Charles University, CISRUS

 

Current debates about academic freedom bring not only the need to find a definition that could be translated to different national and policy contexts but also one that would be inclusive to different groups and functional in times of crises. The following challenges were identified as a call to rethink the classic idea of academic freedom.


Read More


We invite current graduate students and recent PhDs / candidates of sciences (who received their degrees no earlier than five years ago) specializing in social sciences—sociology, anthropology, ethnography, social history, and related disciplines—to submit their work. The competition is open to research articles in English or Russian, not previously published or currently under consideration at any other journal, that are based on original empirical research using qualitative methods.


Read More


New Publisher 2023-05-30

Dear colleagues and friends,

We are pleased to announce that since April 2023
Laboratorium: Russian Review of Social Research is published
by the Institute for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies (IERES)
at George Washington University (USA).
 


Read More


Special Issue: “Rethinking neighborness”

Guest editor: Olga Brednikova, Center for Independent Social Research

In the changing world, neighbor relations acquire new meanings, functions, forms, and spectrums. Mobility, automation, and technology that makes people interaction more indirect, influence the way the rules of neighborness are shaped. In the current issue dedicated to this topic, we look at diverse forms and formats of neighborness in contemporary cities. We are interested to determine how the practices and the culture of neighboring are changing over the course of time; how neighbor relations are transforming and how sustainable the forms of neighbor interactions are in the framework of changing structural conditions and contexts. The main objective of the issue is to bring the study of neghborness to new limits – beyond familiar approaches of urban sociology, concepts of solidarity and communication, all of which consider it a sustainable community, connected by a network of relationships. Instead, we would like to offer new methodological, thematical, and disciplinary perspectives towards analyzing neighborness.

 

 


Read More


Guest editors: Julia Zelikova, associate professor at the Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration, and Elena Bogdanova, associate professor at the European University in St. Petersburg|research fellow at the Centre for Independent Social Research|associate professor at the Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration
Aging is an inevitable process and stage of human life, which is increasingly attracting the attention of scholars in social sciences. Newly emerging social, cultural, medical, and media discourses interpret differently the changes that occur in the human body at the physical and mental levels. Some of them pathologize processes that were previously considered natural and contribute to their medicalization. Others, on the contrary, try to normalize the process of aging and to incorporate the elderly as actors into processes of production and consumption.
A major goal of this special issue of Laboratorium is to consider the phenomenon and process of aging critically and make visible those cultural practices and discourses that produce contemporary interpretations of aging. The issue will bring together scholarship on aging from various social and historical contexts, which problematizes different conceptualizations and representations of old age. The aim of the special issue is to develop better understanding of the socio-cultural meanings embedded in the notions of old age and to produce theoretically informed and methodologically sound interpretations of them.


Read More


We invite authors who conduct research on the ways in which migrants interact with urban space and create/use urban infrastructure in post-Soviet and Eastern European cities to participate in a special issue titled “Migrants in the Post-Soviet City.”


Read More


Since the breakdown of the USSR, policing has changed in different ways in post-Soviet societies, as result of numerous reforms of law enforcement agencies and a promotion of new forms of cooperation with private firms, as well as with citizens (registered volunteers, druzhiny, neighborhood communities and vigilantes). In the 2010s, new forms of policing initiatives have developed: car drivers involved in in denunciating corrupt road traffic policemen; anti-migrant and anti-drug patrols; raids against smokers and drinkers in public spaces; pedophile hunting; organized surveillance of prohibited contents on the Internet; raids in shops to check expiration dates, etc. Those practices encompass—more or less exhaustively according to the case—provocation, search, inquiry, patrol, arrest, seizure and punishment.


Read More


Dear authors and readers! We are glad to inform you that our journal has successfully passed the review procedure and is included in the Scopus database. Laboratorium will be indexed in the database within the next 2-3 months.


Read More


Dear colleagues, we are pleased to inform you that Laboratorium has been included in the Web of Science database. Laboratorium is on the list of Emerging Sources Citation Index, which is part of the Web of Science Core Collection. The journal does not yet have an impact factor, but we hope that eventually it will appear.


Read More


The Editorial Collective of the peer-reviewed journal Laboratorium: Russian Review of Social Research expresses its full support to the administration, faculty, and students of European University in St. Petersburg.  Since its inception, for many years, our journal has specialized in publishing new, cutting-edge research across social sciences and humanities, produced by Russian and foreign scholars.  International independent anonymous expert assessment of published articles is one of the core foundations of the journal.  Based on our experience of collaborating with authors affiliated with European University in St. Petersburg, the editors agree that one of the most progressive, top-notch institutions of higher education in Russia is under threat.  The outcomes of scholarly and pedagogical activities based at the European University set the bar for professional excellence; are thematically and methodologically innovative, and are highly competitive in the international fields of humanities and social sciences.  We assume that the revocation of the license of European University is a short-sighted decision that threatens one of the most successful post-Soviet projects dedicated to overcoming the isolation and underdevelopment of Russian humanities and social sciences.

 

We are proud of our collaboration with European University, and we hope for a successful resolution of this crisis.

 

Editors of the journal Laboratorium: Russian Review of Social Research


Read More


The upcoming issues of Laboratorium are:

1/2017: collecting issue;

2/2017: special issue “On practices of political journalism in France and Russia” (guest editors: Ivan Chupin, University of Versailles Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines, France, and Françoise Daucé, Blaise Pascal University, Clermont-Ferrand, France);

3/2017: special issue based on international conference “Between the Carrot and the Stick: Emerging Needs and Forms for Non-State Actors Including NGOs and Informal Organizations in Contemporary Russia” (guest editors: Elena Bogdanova, Centre for Independent Social Research (CISR) in St. Petersburg, Russia  and Meri Kulmala Aleksanteri Institute, Helsinki, Finland).


Read More