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Regular version of the site

HSE Petersburg Historians and Social Researchers at the XVI April Conference on Social and Economic Development

With less than a month until the XVI International April Conference opens in Moscow, academics from HSE St Petersburg are preparing sections and seminars on a broad range of research topics from space exploration in pre-revolutionary Russia to contemporary happiness and work.

The HSE St Petersburg Centre for Historical Research and the School of History are organising two sections of the XVI April International Conference which begins in Moscow on 7th April 2015. The sections are called New Methodological Approach in History 1and New Methodological Approach in History 2.They will be chaired by Professor Alexander Semyonov, Head of the School and Director of the international research project working group Comparative Historical Studies of Empire and Nationalism.

HSE historians are preparing the following papers for the sections:

  • Relational Spaces in Contemporary German Sociology and History (by Ivan Sablin, Senior Lecturer at the School of History, a research fellow at the CHR and a member of the working group on Comparative historical research on Empire and Nationalism)
  • How new is new spatial history? (by Anton Kotenko, Junior Research Fellow at CHR, and member of the working group on Comparative historical research on Empire and Nationalism)
  • Imagined Continuities in Soviet City Symbols (by Evgeny Manzhurin, doctoral student at the St Petersburg School of History)
  • One Show to Please Them All: Selling Status and Nationalism in Late Imperial Russia (by Nikita Balagurov, doctoral student at the St Petersburg School of History)
  • The perception of space and boundaries in diplomatic documents of Rus' and Lithuania, XV-XVI cc. (by Kuzma Kukushkin, doctoral student at the HSE St Petersburg School of History)
  • Empire of Science: Scientific Colonisation of Space in the late Russian Empire, 1845 – 1914 (by Dmitry Mordvinov, PhD Candidate at UBC and an affiliated researcher at CHR)

Meanwhile the Laboratory for Comparative Social Research LCRS is lining up expert speakers and participants for it’s Fifth International Workshop ‘Social and Cultural changes in cross-national perspective: Subjective Well-being, Trust, Social capital and Values’ which will take place in Moscow as a part of the XVI April Conference.

The workshop aims to develop empirical quantitative comparative (cross-country and cross-regional) studies in social science. The topics for the conference are Subjective Well-being and Social Capital, Trust and Social Capital, Norms, Values and Value Change, Informal relations and Corruption, Precarious Work and Subjective Well-being.

The keynote speakers bring a truly international flavour to the workshop. HSE LCRS Professor Christian Welzel’s research focuses on the question of how ordinary people’s value orientations vary across the political cultures of contemporary societies in a global comparative perspective. Welzel has published extensively about developmental processes that transform political cultures and how such transformations affect political institutions, especially democracy.

Eric Uslaner, Professor of Government and Politics at the University of Maryland is author of The Moral Foundations of Trustand Corruption, Inequality and the Rule of Lawin which he suggests that the roots of corruption lie in economic and legal inequality and low levels of generalised trust.  

Professor Fabrizio Zilibotti currently holds the Chair of Macroeconomics and Political Economy of the Department of Economics at the University of Zurich. He is Scientific Director and Deputy Director of the UBS International Center of Economics in Society. His research interests include economic growth and development, political economy, macroeconomics, and the economic development of China. He has also written about trust and the role of distrust in conflicts in Africa.

Arne Kalleberg is a Kenan Distinguished Professor of Sociology at the University of North Carolina. He studies labor force issues at the interface of sociology, economics, and psychology. He has written extensively on the emergence of nonstandard work arrangements such as temporary, contract, and part-time work in the US, Asia and Europe. His recent book, Good Jobs, Bad Jobs: The Rise of Polarized and Precarious Employment Systems in the United States, 1970s to 2000s(Russell Sage Foundation, 2011), examines the growing precarity of work and the polarization of jobs with regard to earnings as well as non-economic rewards such as the control people have over their work activities and schedules, especially in balancing work and family. His major current projects include a cross-national study of precarious work in a number of Asian countries (China, India, Indonesia, Japan, South Korea, Sri Lanka, Philippines, Taiwan, Thailand, Vietnam).

See also:

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