News

Undergraduate and master’s students of the HSE Faculty of Communications, Media and Design, together with the School of Sociology and School of Political Science are launching a research project on the need for design solutions in Moscow’s districts.

Master’s programme in Comparative Social Research was launched in 2014 and has been rapidly developing since. Its Academic Supervisor Christian Fröhlich talks about what the programme offers the applicants and what makes it unique.

On January 31st – February 3^rd 2016, the Winter School of the Faculty of Social Sciences was held at the ‘Voronovo’ Learning Centre, HSE. During the event, potential master’s students took part in master classes, business cases and meetings with students and graduates of the faculty’s educational programmes.

Parents of school students in Moscow tend to believe that test assignments in two major final exams—the Basic State Exam (BSE) and the Unified State Exam (USE)—are too complex and teachers fail to properly prepare students for the finals; this negative attitude, which appears to be a widely-held stereotype not necessarily supported by evidence, is formed long before the exams come round. However, according to a study by Alina Pishnyak and Natalia Khalina, once the exams are over, families no longer consider them so hard to pass.

Christian Frohlich has been a Research Fellow at the Centre for Studies of Civil Society and Non-Profit Sector since 2014. This year he is being fast tracked for tenure in the HSE Faculty of Social Sciences in the School of Sociology. Dr Frohlich has a DPhil in Sociology from Leipzig University, Germany. He spoke to HSE English News about his research into civic activism in Russia and about why he likes living and working in Moscow.

Karl Bruckmeier is an environmental sociologist and since 2011 he has been a professor at the Analysis of Social Institutions Department at the HSE Faculty of Social Sciences. He talked to the HSE English News Service about the challenges of being an interdisciplinary academic and about the pace of change in Russia in attitudes towards the environment. Anna Chernyakhovskaya began the interview by asking Professor Bruckmeier about his life at HSE.