News for those who are in Venice. On September 28-30, VIU will host an international symposium aimed at addressing the challenges of science communication and public engagement faced by academic and research institutions. Anyone can attend the event.

The expert will speak at the session “How women are fighting for their rights and social opportunities, from the capital to small towns”.

Olga Bychkova, Dean of the Faculty of Sociology, Director of the Center for Science and Technology Studies (STS Center) of the European University, told the RBC.Trends about the trends in the science of the future — the entry of digital technologies into science, interdisciplinarity, the gradual disappearance of fundamental research, etc.

On March 22, 2023, Alexey Knorre, a graduate of the EUSP Faculty of Political Science and Sociology, defended his PhD thesis in criminology at the University of Pennsylvania

We continue the rubric with stories of our graduates. Today we are publishing a review by Lyubov Chernysheva, a PhD student in Sociology at the University of Amsterdam. We recently congratulated her on defending her Ph.D. thesis “Digital Transformation of Neighboring Urban Communities (St. Petersburg, Russia case study)”.  

On April 27, 2022, Lyubov Chernysheva defended her PhD thesis. Lyubov Chernysheva graduated from the Faculty of Political Sciences and Sociology in 2016 and began her studies as a postgraduate student of the Faculty of Sociology and Philosophy in 2019.

Professor of the Department of Sociology, EUSP, Dr. Anna Temkina has co-authored an article written by the WHO Regional Office for Europe expert group “Cultural contexts of health and well-being” (CCH). The article has been published by Nature Human Behaviour after the virtual expert group meeting on June 12, 2020.

Some modern scientists tend to interpret the coronavirus pandemic as nature's revenge: with the help of viruses, nature “gives us back” for animal cruelty and environmental crisis. However, if you follow the theory proposed by the French philosopher Georges Bataille back in the 1940s, nature should not be confused with man, it does nothing on purpose. Violence committed by nature (such as an earthquake) is sovereign because it does not pursue any goal. Nature acts beyond humans, which also means beyond good and evil.

What do we know about the virus — is it a living or non-living organism? What methods do we use in order not to get infected (besides forced self-isolation)? Why we do not blame ourselves for the spread of the virus, but animals — bats, rats, marmots, snakes, pangolins? And what is important to understand in order not to be in a state of “bare life”?

Being in isolation in the Leningrad Region, Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the European University in Saint Petersburg Oksana Timofeeva took part in the online project “Letters Against Separation” — a collective project on the E-flux conversations platform, in which authors from different parts of the world reflect on how Covid-19 influenced them, their loved ones, their cities and their work through a series of short, diary-like letters.

The article by Artemy Magun, a professor of the Democratic Theory at the European University, published in The Philosophical Salon discusses the crisis of social distance using the examples of the coronavirus pandemic and the events initiated by the #metoo flashmob.

The New York Times newspaper published an article about how people around the world start keeping their diaries with their experiences of living through a pandemic. Their diaries are told in words and pictures: pantry inventories, window views, questions about the future, concerns about the present. Some diarists record statistics: the number of infections, the number of deaths. Others keep diaries that are part shopping list, part doodle pad.

The event is organized in conjunction with the Freud's Dream Museum. Do we live in the end times, just before the end, or maybe already after the end?

In earlier work Allan, Vucetic, and Hopf argued that the rise of China was unlikely to be accompanied by Chinese hegemony because of the distribution of identities among the world's great powers. In particular, the only great power in the world with which China's "authoritarian capitalism" resonates is Russia. In this work we extend our analysis to China's more immediate neighborhood. As William Wohlforth argued in 1999, China faces a regional hegemony problem long before it faces a global one.

The Russian Science Foundation will support a research project headed by Ekaterina Borozdina, Candidate of Sciences in Sociology, Dean of the EUSP Department of Sociology and Philosophy.

In what is arguably his most politically oriented work, Seminar XVII – The Other Side of Psychoanalysis (1969-70), Jacques Lacan coins the neologism anthropie in order to refer to a form of entropy – a degradation or loss of energy – that would be specific to the human animal. In my presentation I will scrutinise this expression. First, I will introduce the notion of discourse, which is the main focus of Seminar XVII.

Hegel famously maintained that no philosophy can be summed up in a single proposition or a first principle. As he said in the Phenomenology of Spirit: “Any so-called basic proposition or principle of philosophy, if true, is also false, just because it is only a principle.” Its truth can only lie in its development, its deployment, ultimately in a system, not in the assessment of some foundational proposition.

The issue includes articles by Antonio Negri, Merab Mamardashvili, Evgeni Pavlov, Pascal Sévérac, Maria Chehonadskih, Andrey Maidansky, Evald Ilyenkov, Giuliano Vivaldi, Alex Levant, Artemy Magun, Keti Chukhrov, Alexei Penzin, Valery Podoroga.

The report will explore the encounter between psychoanalysis and philosophy at the point where the two seem to be the most incompatible. Sex (and psychoanalytic theory of sexuality) is something that philosophy usually doesn't know what to do with; sex is the question usually left out in even the most friendly philosophical appropriations of Lacan and his concepts. And ontology (as since of pure being) is something that psychoanalysis doesn't know what to do with, or is highly critical about.

Are Copycats Subversive?Strategy-31, the Russian Runs, the Immortal Regiment, and the Transformative Potential of Non-Hierarchical Movements