Education at the School of Sociology

The School’s faculty members teach in the following educational programmes: undergraduate programme in Sociology; five Master’s programmes in sociology (Complex Social Analysis, Applied Methods of Social Analysis of Markets, Sociology of Public and Business Analytics, Comparative Social Research, and Demography); and in the Doctoral School of Sociology. These programmes engage both the School’s Russian and international lecturers. The latter are most actively involved in teaching courses in English for the academic development group in the undergraduate programme and for the Master’s programme in Comparative Social Research taught jointly with HSE St. Petersburg. However, sociology students are not the only ones who study sociology; lecturers from the School of Sociology teach in 26 undergraduate and 15 Master’s programmes, as well as in the doctoral schools of most HSE faculties.

Starting in the 2014/2015 academic year, leading professors and associate professors from the School teach sociology to first-year undergraduate students in programmes such as Psychology, Economics, Economics and Statistics, Logistics and Supply Chain Management, Management, Public Administration, Jurisprudence, Asian Studies, Political Science, Advertising and Public Relations, Journalism, Media Communications, Philology, Fundamental and Applied Linguistics, History, Philosophy, Cultural Studies, and Design.

Many professors from the School have authored textbooks and monographs in the areas of their research, including Svetlana Barsukova (informal economics), Alexander Gofman (history of theoretical sociology and sociology of fashion), Inna Devyatko (methodology and methods of sociological research), Leokadia Drobizheva (ethnosociology), Leonid Kosals (industrial sociology), Alexey Levinson (qualitative methods in sociology), Nikita Pokrovsky (globalization theory), Vadim Radaev (sociology of markets), Yuliana Tolstova (mathematical statistical models in sociology), Alexander Chepurenko (sociology of entrepreneurship), Dmitry Sсhmerling (methods of expert evaluations), and others.

In addition, lecturers from the Analysis of Social Institutions Department actively teach in programmes in Political Science, International Relations, and Multimedia Journalism. Their colleagues from the Department of Economic Sociology have successfully taught courses in economic sociology and market sociology in undergraduate programmes in Economics and Economics and Statistics. Faculty from the Department of Sociological Research Methods teach courses on data collection and analysis methods to students in the Faculty of Business and Management and the Faculty of Communications, Media and Design; these courses include Advertising and PR, Management, and Integrated Communications. The Department of General Sociology cooperates with educational programmes in the Graduate School of Urbanism and the Faculty of Humanities, as well as programmes in Multimedia Journalism, Visual Culture and others.

Apart from these departments, the School of Sociology includes four joint departments with highly regarded Russian survey centres: the Public Opinion Foundation, VCIOM, and GFK Rus. Heads of these departments – Alexander Oslon, Valery Fedorov, Lev Gudkov, and Alexander Demidov – teach special elective courses and offer students opportunities to take part in internships.

The School is actively introducing new forms of teaching and is currently developing several massive open online courses on Open Education, a Russian platform. Alexander Gofman’s course  on General Sociology and Vadim Radaev’s course on Economic Sociology were launched during the 2015/2016 academic year.