Research & Expertise

From the 8th - 10th January, teachers at the Department of Sociology at the Faculty of Social Sciences Olga Savinskaya and Elizaveta Polukhina, and HSE graduate Anastasia Poilova took part in the The Qualitative Report Sixth Annual Conference organised by the international peer-reviewed journal Qualitative Report.

From December 7 to 11, 2014, an international conference called ‘Borders in the Interface: bordering Europe, Africa and Middle East’, took place in Israel. Organized by Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Beer-Sheva together with the EU’s 7th Framework Programme for Research and Technological Development, the event brought researchers from Europe, Asia, Africa, and America to present research on border cooperation and policies.

Melanie Sheldon, an instructor at the University of Missouri – Columbia, recently offered a lecture course at the HSE Winter School 2015 on the psychology of motivation, which was organized by the International Laboratory of Positive Psychology of Personality and Motivation, headed by Dmitry Leontiev. She also offered an open lecture on 'Sex and Evolutionary Psychology' at HSE. Melanie recently spoke with the HSE news service about her experience taking part in the HSE Winter School.

For the first time since the 2010 heat wave in Moscow, demographers have estimated the effects of abnormal heat, wildfires and air pollution on morbidity and mortality. Extreme heat in Moscow in the summer of 2010 caused nearly 11,000 additional deaths from diseases of the nervous and cardiovascular systems and respiratory and kidney conditions, according to a group of researchers including Tatyana Kharkova and Ekaterina Kvasha of the HSE Institute of Demography, members of the Russian Academy of Sciences, MosEconomMonitoring, and Swedish researchers.

On the eve of the new year we spoke to the head of the International Laboratory of Positive Psychology of Personality and Motivation, Dmitry Leontiev about why positive psychology does not solve problems but keeps them at bay, is uncertainty dangerous and why shouldn’t we battle with anxiety about the future.

On December 9, as part of a seminar run by the HSE’s Laboratory for Studies in Economic Sociology, there was an opportunity to meet Kyungmin Baek, new Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Social Sciences, School of Sociology, who joined HSE in September 2014. In a report about South Korean firms’ comprehensive adoption of the ISO 14001 environmental standard, Baek explained how businesses’ motivation has changed. 

This talk was given at a local TEDx event, produced independently of the TED Conferences. Head of HSE School of Psychology Vasily Klucharev showed what occurs in the human brain when a person’s opinion conflicts with the majority’s opinion. What happens in the brains of nonconformists? What causes the «herd mentality»?

Middle-aged Russians whose younger years fell in the era of change fear for their future and tend to save more money than they spend. In contrast, Russia's elderly and young adults are avid consumers: the former have survived hardship and scarcity – potential loss does not scare them, while the latter share the inherent optimism of youth, according to the paper 'Consumer Expectations of the Russian Public (1996-2009): Interconnections across Cohorts, Generations, and Ages' by Dilyara Ibragimova, Senior Researcher at the HSE's Laboratory for Studies in Economic Sociology.

The summer time was very fruitful and the HSE moved forward on a number of fronts from launching new international laboratories, remarkable number of newly hired international faculty to the structural transformation of the university departments. The September issue of the English bulletin The HSE LooK gives an overview of some important changes and new projects taking place at the HSE in the new academic year.

Andrei Melville, Dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences, reflects on the direction of political science today.