Laboratorium: Russian Review of Social Research

Polysemantic Bisexuality and the Pragmatics of Sexual Identity

2022-11-24T14:16:57+03:00

The article examines the meanings that bisexuality is endowed with from the outside (by those who do not identify as bisexual at the current moment) and from within (by those for whom this is an actual identity). The study is based on biographical interviews and written autobiographies collected from nonheterosexual people: homosexual, bisexual, and those who avoid specific sexual identities. Bisexuality appears as a polysemous category with porous, flexible, hard-to-perceive boundaries. Because of its instability, some refuse to see bisexuality as a “true,” stable form of sexuality or sexual identity. Others see it as only a transitional, temporary state, a “middle ground” between homosexuality and heterosexuality, or as a predisposition for sexual development. Of particular importance in the context of bisexual self-determination is temporality: the vision of one’s past, present, and future is tightly woven into the process of self-identification. Bisexual identity can be unstable, combined with other identities, and sometimes replaced by them within the same narrative. While trying to capture the diversity of meanings associated with bisexuality, the article raises a broader question about the pragmatics of sexual identity in general: Why do nonheterosexual people (not) choose this or that sexual identity? What are the social processes behind sexual self-identification or refusal of it? In addition, the article offers a historical review of bisexuality studies and also systematizes currently existing theoretical conceptualizations of bisexuality.

Article in Russian

Narrative Structures of “Escape”: Progressive Narrative and Cultural Structures of Upward Mobility at an Elite Russian University

2023-03-10T10:43:47+03:00

Recently, cultural underpinnings of social mobility have received increased attention in scholarly literature. As educational systems and social policies partly level the playing field for educational and career opportunities, it is becoming increasingly important for the less privileged to recognize these opportunities, evaluate their benefits, and take advantage of them. This study examines the narrative structures that organize the experience of people participating in rapid upward mobility. The study focused on a group of participants in one of Russia’s leading universities’ affirmative action program and, through 22 semistructured in-depth biographical interviews, examined the characteristics of their motivation, aspirations, imagination, action, and choice strategies. As we shifted to the next level of generalization, we established how these elements comprise larger-scale narrative structures of organizing experience. The findings revealed significant differences with the patterns seen in many Western studies of the cultural underpinnings of inequality that highlight the critical role of “class trauma” in how young people from unprivileged families frame their life paths. The study employed the conceptual opposition of progressive vs. tragic narrative types proposed by Jeffrey Alexander and found that these structures organize experiences, practical evaluations, judgments, and decisions in fundamentally different ways. Our results show that, contrary to the patterns known from the studies conducted in the United States and some other Western countries, the progressive narrative predominates in the group studied in Russia. In addition, the main characteristics of the organization of the experience of upward mobility related to enrollment in an elite university have been identified, which generally fit into the cultural scheme of the “escape”—a break with the cultural and moral reference systems of the social environment that the study respondents have left. The moral dimension of the problem is particularly noteworthy: respondents generally evaluated their experiences of upward mobility positively, not in pragmatic terms, as might be expected, but in moral terms.

Article in Russian

Leave Not Stay. Introduction to the Thematic Block

2024-01-19T08:44:10+03:00

Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 had an enormous impact on various areas of life in Russia itself; yet, one of its consequences most widely covered by the media was the mass emigration of Russian citizens. Why has it attracted so much attention from the media and researchers— several research groups are now examining various aspects of this new wave—and why is it of interest to the authors of this thematic block and editors of the journal where it is appearing?

List of Article Manuscript Reviewers, 2023

2024-01-19T11:19:48+03:00

List of Article Manuscript Reviewers, 2023.

Life in Motion: Mobility and Identity among Russian Migrants in the South Caucasus

2024-01-19T09:08:08+03:00

The South Caucasus has emerged as a prominent destination for migrants from Russia following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. The essay highlights both the complex and heterogeneous nature of current migration from Russia to the South Caucasus and the challenges inherent in categorizing and grouping diverse migrant communities. Describing the identity of migrants, we focus on the actual moment of moving from Russia to Armenia or Georgia, living in these countries, and the panorama of staying, returning, or leaving for a third place. Many people from the current wave of migration are engaged in remote work, primarily in the IT sector, and have a relatively high income compared to the host community.
This trend to seek temporary residence in countries with milder climates and lower living costs, combined with remote work opportunities, is shared by lifestyle migrants, winter tourists, digital nomads, and Russians who fled in 2022. Looking at such new types of migration, researchers have criticized the privilege and inequality of this lifestyle, as well as their weak involvement in the local agenda. However, it is noteworthy that these communities of migrants are characterized by practices of mutual assistance and a commitment to ecological values, which in turn foster attention to the local environment. The essay describes volunteer practices and explores the concept of disengagement from civic life inherent in lifestyle migration or nomadism.

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Shock Wave of Russian Emigration and Self-Reflection of Its Representatives

2024-01-19T09:16:07+03:00

This essay introduces the notion of the shock wave of Russian emigration, applicable to those Russian citizens who strongly opposed the outbreak of military aggression against Ukraine and chose to leave Russia within the first weeks of the beginning of the fullscale invasion on February 24, 2022. Based on the data collected from in-depth interviews, the study of the shock wave gives an overview of the spectrum of the respondents’ personal motivations for leaving the country, fears and expectations that were driving them, and their deeper reflection on their experiences where metaphors and imagery play a very prominent role.

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Migrants, Tourists, Relokanty, or Occupiers? Essay on Russians in Tbilisi, Broken Hospitality, and the Right to the City

2024-01-19T09:29:08+03:00

In the essay, I invite readers to trace my work with the concept of the right to the city to analyze how Russian citizens who have moved to Tbilisi, Georgia, over the past 10 years, including after the outbreak of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, are settling in. The materials collected during fieldwork in August 2022 allow me to question the universalism inherent in the right to the city literature and, from the perspective of the intersection of multiple factors—from economic status to their origin in the former metropolis—to consider the possibility of Russians who find themselves in Tbilisi realizing their right to the city. I consistently conceptualize Russians as “tourists” and “digital nomads” oriented toward the consumption of urban goods and as “migrants” who are attuned to but, in some cases, excluded from urban life by the local community.
To this analytical division, I “try on” the concept of the right to the city and show where it does or does not work. I conclude that, first, the concept fails to take into account the intersection of different characteristics that serve as the basis for inequalities that may arise within the group of potential subjects of the right to the city. I recommend being more attentive to the differences within the “Russians in Tbilisi” group and considering the switches between specific situations of manifestation of the right to the city. I also draw attention to the fact that the concept has an ethical dimension related to showing compassion to the subjects of the right to the city, which makes it problematic to work with in complex contexts such as the migration of Russians to Georgia in 2022.

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Authors

2024-01-19T11:13:16+03:00

This issue's authors.

Roman Katsman i Maxim D. Shrayer, red. Ocherki po istorii russko-izrail'skoi literatury. Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2023

2023-08-16T18:24:28+03:00

Отнесение литературного произведения к национальной литературе – способ классификации не хуже и не лучше любого другого. Между тем корпус той или иной национальной литературы нередко путают с корпусом текстов, написанных на конкретном языке. При всей релятивности национально-культурных границ художественные произведения, написанные в Израиле на русском языке, все же удобнее обсуждать «по ведомству» еврейской литературы не потому, что Израиль – еврейское государство, а потому, что такой подход дает возможность осмыслить их в русле определенной традиции.

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Geneviève Zubrzycki. Resurrecting the Jew: Nationalism, Philosemitism, and Poland’s Jewish Revival. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2022

2023-09-05T05:02:19+03:00

Geneviève Zubrzycki, a distinguished comparative-historical and cultural sociologist who studies national identity, religion, and collective memory, has written a fascinating and insightful book, based on a decade of participant observation and interviews in multiple Polish cities and towns, about an astonishing Jewish revival in Poland since the early 2000s. This revival takes various forms: the organizing of Jewish festivals in cities and towns throughout Poland since the mid-2000s, the “popularity of klezmer music,” the “proliferation of Judaica bookstores and Jewish-style restaurants,” the creation of “new museums, memorials, and memory spaces,” the development of “Jewish and Holocaust studies programs in universities,” the publication of books and articles on Jewish topics, and even a “modest but steady number of conversions to Judaism” (p. 8).

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Alexei Miller, Olga Malinova i Dmitry Efremenko, red. Politika pamiati v Rossii – regional'noe izmerenie. Moscow: Institut nauchnoi informatsii po obshchestvennym naukam RAN, 2023

2023-09-04T11:13:15+03:00

Исследования политики памяти уже прочно заняли весьма значимое место в научной литературе. При этом тематика подобных исследований включает как традиционный национальный уровень, так и набирающий обороты анализ наднациональных и региональных и даже локальных практик политического использования прошлого. Рецензируемая монография продолжает традицию исследований политики памяти в отдельных российских регионах, сложившуюся вокруг Центра по изучению культурной памяти и символической политики Европейского университета в Санкт-Петербурге (см., например, Лапин и Миллер 2021), и представляет собой весьма амбициозную попытку систематизации «политики памяти в ее региональном аспекте, но в масштабе всей России» (с. 21). Как отмечают авторы, в книге «создана основа для картирования мнемонического ландшафта России, позволяющая фиксировать динамические изменения в политике памяти как на федеральном, так и на региональном уровне» (с. 23).

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Sarah Cameron. Golodnaia step': Golod, nasilie i sozdanie Sovetskogo Kazakhstana. Moscow: NLO, 2020

2023-09-12T23:07:29+03:00

Книга американской исследовательницы Сары Камерон (Sarah Cameron) «Голодная степь: голод, насилие и создание Советского Казахстана» (The Hungry Steppe: Famine, Violence, and the Making of Soviet Kazakhstan) впервые была опубликована в 2018 году в США. На русском же языке она вышла в 2020 году в издательстве «Новое литературное обозрение». Центральная тема работы – массовый голод в Казахстане в 1930–1933 годах. Хотя в этот период голод охватил население сельских районов в разных частях СССР, основное внимание историков до сих пор было приковано к голоду в Украине, в то время как о казахской трагедии известно намного меньше.

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Natasha Grigorian. Visions of the Future: Malthusian Thought Experiments in Russian Literature (1840–1960). Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2023

2023-09-18T16:29:10+03:00

Томас Мальтус известен теорией, согласно которой рост общественного благосостояния и производства товаров должен сопровождаться ростом численности населения, что в конечном счете приведет к экономическому кризису и массовому голоду, а численность населения, соответственно, вновь снизится. Однако рецензируемая книга обращает внимание на мальтузианство не только и не столько в связи с этими безрадостными прогнозами, сколько в связи с формой, в которой они были представлены. Автор монографии считает Мальтуса одним из изобретателей особого типа письма на стыке литературного повествования и научной полемики: в «Опыте закона о народонаселении» (1798) для убедительного доказательства собственной гипотезы Мальтус задействует образные и риторические ресурсы фикциональной литературы, описывая расцвет и падение вымышленного общества (с. 6).

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Jonathan Brunstedt. The Soviet Myth of World War II: Patriotic Memory and the Russian Question in the USSR. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021

2023-09-24T22:44:41+03:00

В недавнем исследовании «Советский миф Второй мировой войны: Патриотическая память и русский вопрос в СССР» Джонатан Брунстедт рассматривает проблемы национальной политики, патриотической мобилизации и русского национализма в контексте официальной памяти о войне. На основе множества архивных источников и опубликованных научных работ автор рассматривает технологии и механизмы культурного управления и мифотворчества, использовавшиеся советскими элитами с целью создания общей (над)национальной идентичности, для которой Великая Отечественная война стала объединяющим фактором.

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Kyrill Kunakhovich. Communism’s Public Sphere: Culture as Politics in Cold War Poland and East Germany. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2022

2023-10-03T18:55:22+03:00

The enduring interest in exploring the regimes of public spheres within communist societies has not waned in recent years. Much of this can be attributed to communism’s constraints on free expression, rendering cultural domains as almost the sole platforms for public spheres. In his book, historian Kyrill Kunakhovich, who specializes in contemporary Central and Eastern Europe, sheds light on the political role played by cultural spaces under communist regimes. By focusing on Leipzig (former East Germany) and Kraków (Poland) as comparative units of analysis, Kunakhovich traces the evolution of state-society relationships within cultural realms under the communist rule, from the arrival of the Red Army in Eastern Europe in 1944 to the reunification of Germany in 1990. The author explores how these interactions reshaped the sociopolitical landscapes of both countries and brought about transformations in communist politics. Employing a comparative and transnational historical approach, Kunakhovich transcends the mere juxtaposition of national case studies examining them in tandem, a perspective that “inevitably highlights the contrasts between them” (p. 16). Given the limitation of comparative case studies that may not fully encompass the entirety of the panorama, the book seeks to illuminate the dynamics within both countries’ public spheres as they manifested in communist cultural spaces.

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Cassandra Hartblay. I Was Never Alone or Oporniki: An Ethnographic Play on Disability in Russia. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2020

2023-10-11T15:59:53+03:00

Книга Кассандры Хартблэй, представляющая собой попытку антропологического изучения инвалидности в одном российском городе, написана в экспериментальном для подобного исследования жанре. Это самая настоящая пьеса, созданная по результатам этнографической работы автора и опирающаяся на материалы интервью. Драматическая часть (собственно пьеса) состоит из шести сцен, представляющих вниманию читателя шесть главных персонажей – три женских образа и три мужских. Произведение снабжено авторскими вводными замечаниями и заключающим «этнографическим эссе». В конце можно найти приложения с заметками
для режиссеров и актеров, а также фотографиями уже прошедших постановок и читок пьесы.

Text in Russian