On March 13th, the European University hosted an open forum devoted to the topic of migration and urban development, with support from the Consulate General of the Netherlands in St. Petersburg and the Netherlands Institute in St. Petersburg. St. Petersburg and Amsterdam were given special attention as “open” cities, whose populations have a high proportion of migrants.  

On March 5th, Sanna Turoma, a senior research fellow at the Aleksanteri Institute of the University of Helsinki, visited EUSP. Professor Turoma gave a talk on the ‘spatial turn’ in Russian studies. In the history of the social sciences there have been three paradigmatic shifts: linguistic, cultural, and, finally, spatial. What possibilities will this spatial turn open up in the studies of Russia and the Soviet Union?

On February, 27th the European University hosted a presentation by Bart Goldhoorn, which took place as part of the third conference of the “Second World Urbanity” project. Like the project itself, Goldhoorn’s presentation was an attempt to understand the experience of “socialist urbanism,” the mass urban development of the Soviet period, and much more.

On February 18th, as part of the Department of Art History’s Visual Studies program (with support from the Coca-Cola Company), Eva Berar gave a lecture from a series titled “Forming the Image of the ‘Big City’ at the Turn of the 19th-20th Centuries. St. Petersburg-Europe.” Professor Berar is a researcher at the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS), in France. The lecture series will focus on how cities were imagined, portrayed and built in Russia and Western Europe.

On January 20th, Department of History graduate Konstantin Tarasov successfully defended his candidate’s dissertation “Voennaia organizatsiya bol’shevikov i bor’ba za vlast’ v Petrogradskom garnizone v 1917 g. [Bolshevik Military Organization and the Struggle for Power in the Petrograd Garrison in 1917].” The defense took place at the St. Petersburg Institute of History, Russian Academy of Sciences.  Congratulations!

The President of the Russian Federation’s Grants Council for State Support of Young Russian Scholars—Candidates of Sciences and for State Support of Russian Scientific Schools has announced its 2015 grant winners.

On December 23, as part of the interdisciplinary seminar “Care Regimes for the Aging Citizens” and the EUSP Department of Political Science and Sociology’s Gender Studies Program, Zhanna Chernova (Doctor of Sociology, Higher School of Economics-St. Petersburg) delivered a lecture. Researchers began to take an interest in issues of care in the 1980s and 1990s, when it was seen primarily in the context of parenting. This talk discusses three approaches to conceptualizing care that have been established in scientific literature.

On December 20, 2014, the EUSP hosted an open seminar titled “The Cultivation of a View: Paradoxes of Diderot.” The seminar was organized jointly by the EUSP’s Department of Art History and the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities (Russian State University for the Humanities), with support from the Coca Cola Company. The seminar brought together the specialists from St. Petersburg, Moscow and New York to discuss the reception of Denis Diderot’s theoretical views.

On December 17th, prominent American historian Ronald Suny gave a presentation.

On December 5-6, 2014, the European University at St. Petersburg hosted the second Conference on the Scientific Diaspora, titled “Points of Growth for the Russian Sciences”. Four years have already gone since the first conference was held. In 2010, we discussed which conditions should be created in Russia to stimulate and facilitate the development of the sciences and effective collaboration between Russian-speaking scholars living in different countries all over the world.

Architect Michael Arad gave a lecture on the creation of the memorial to the victims of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks in New York. Arad was the memorial’s designer and gave a lecture at EUSP as part of the Department of Art History’s Open Research Seminar, with support from the United States Consulate General in St. Petersburg. Arad began with his own story of the project’s creation, starting with his personal impressions of the tragic day observed from the roof of his own home, and ending with the opening ceremony of the memorial on the tenth anniversary of the attack.

Frank Ruda (Free University of Berlin) gave a lecture as part of the Department of Political Science and Sociology’s interdisciplinary seminar, in the EUSP’s Gold Hall. In his speech, Ruda raised the following questions: What is political affect? Is there a genuine political affect? What are its specifics?

Professor of social anthropology from the University of Oslo Thomas Hylland Eriksen spoke at the EUSP as part of the BP Professorship in the Anthropology of Migration and the regular meeting of the “Transnational and Migration Studies” seminar. Eriksen is the author of the book “What is Anthropology” (recently published in Russian) as well as books that have become classics of modern anthropology: “Ethnicity and Nationalism” and “Small Places—Large Issues.”

The section “Health and Care” took place on November 8th. Professors and students from the Gender Studies program gave presentations that laid out two primary directions of the program’s activities: the gendered aspects of health studies, and the study of care as a social institution and practice.

This section of the VDNH VIII conference was devoted to the topic of urban transportation. The panel’s inspirer and organizer Andrei Kuznetsov (PAST-Center, Tomsk State University/Volgograd State University) pointed out that a critical mass of research on urban transportation has appeared in Russia — we are possibly on the verge of a whole wave of academic texts on the “turn toward mobility.” Public transportation exists simultaneously as both a place and object of research, and is viewed with both social and technological criteria.

The section’s opening remarks were delivered by dean of the Department of Political Science and Sociology, Artemy Magun, who spoke about the history of right-wing Russian thought. Conservative ideology was born in Russia as an elite movement in the form of a defensive reaction to the French Revolution. It’s objective was mainly to preserve the status quo, with a strain of rather utopian romanticism in the spirit of “the past was better.”

The section “Migration: The Period of Limitations (The North and Immigrants) took place as part of the conference VDNH. This section was noteworthy as it presented the results of the work of two actively developing academic trends within the EUSP — social studies of the Arctic and Siberia, and the anthropological study of migration.

EUSP hosted the 13th meeting of the project "Manifesta 10: Dialogues” in the Conference Hall. Lyudmila Bredikhina and Silvia Eiblmayr are researchers and curators working on projects in the field of gender studies, and they presented different views on the problem of the representation and perception of the female body in art. The dialogue was structured as two statements “in painting”: Bredikhina and Eiblmayr limited their commentaries to the images and expressed several hypotheses on their subject.

The International School on the Sociology of Science and Technology organized jointly by the EUSP’s Center for Science and Technology Studies and the St. Petersburg branch of the Institute for the History of Science and Technology (Russian Academy of Sciences) was held. The school’s 30th session was named “The Russian Scientometrics: Past, Present and Future. Fifty Years of the Russian Sociology of Science.” Scientists and researchers came from the United States, Finland, Belarus, and many Russian cities.

Aleksander Voloshin met with university professors and students in the Golden Hall. Voloshin was a former head of the Presidential Administration and chairman of the board of such large companies as RAO “UES” and “Norilsk Nickel.” He is now primarily involved in projects on science and innovation, serving on the Yandex director’s council, supervisory board of the Higher School of Economics, the coordination committee of the Skolkovo school, and others. In a brief introduction, EUSP rector Oleg Kharkhordin remarked that such a shift in interests is similar to the ideas of Bourdieu.