Culture, Science, AI: How the School of Arts and Humanities held HSE's International Partner Week
For the third year in a row, spring at HSE University–Saint Petersburg has closed with International Partner Week, a series of events aimed at building a global academic dialogue. This year, the St. Petersburg campus welcomed over 100 delegates from 20 countries, spanning from the UAE and Colombia to China and Japan. One of the central themes of the discussions and master classes led by international experts was the transformation and challenges of the modern academic environment.
The School of Arts and Humanities organized two expert sessions, which, alongside heads of programmes, professors, and students, featured international colleagues from universities in Brazil, India, Serbia, China, and other countries.
Students' immersion into the international environment began with lectures and master classes from partner universities. Professor Nadežda Stojković of the University of Niš (Serbia), one of the world's leading experts in academic communication, told about how the ability to clearly formulate, argue, and defend one's academic position directly affects the quality of both written and oral discourse, as well as the success of one's research. A lecture by Professor Gauri Chakraborty of Bennett University (India), who combines academic work with film practice, was devoted to the role of women in Indian cinema. That same day, students also had the opportunity to reflect on the transformation of higher education, local communities, urban studies, brands and modern narratives, among many other topics.
On another day, discussions organized by various HSE faculties took place. The School of Arts and Humanities' expert session Antiquity in the Modern World: Rethinking Space, Meanings, and Images was moderated by Adrian Selin, Dean of the School and head of the History programme. Emerging and experienced researchers alike discussed how practices in architectural heritage preservation are changing and what role modern technologies play in that process. Professor Davis Gruber Sansolo of the University of São Paulo (Brazil) actively joined the discussion, stressing that cultural heritage objects not only shape the urban landscape but also immerse us in a historical era and its social structure.
The History programme is adapting to contemporary practices of working with architectural monuments. For instance, students engage in 3D visualization of spaces as part of the course Antiquities Digitized: Exploring the Potential of Digital Humanities in Historical Research and, as early as their second year, gain hands-on experience in creating virtual models. No less important is working with artefacts of the past in a manner more traditional for historians: in the summer after their first year, students go on an archaeological field trip, where they take part in excavations.
Another expert session held by the School, Global Academic Communication: Strategies, Challenges, and New Literacies, brought together specialists from Serbia, India, China, and Russia. The meeting was moderated by Natalia Ursul, Head of the Department of Foreign Languages and of the new programme Texts, Languages, and Digital Tools, which is designed, among other things, to train specialists in intercultural communication equipped with digital competencies.
The theme of the session was deliberately framed in broad terms: today, global academic communication concerns not only researchers, but also educators and university administrators, and extends far beyond the use of English alone. The discussion brought together both practical and strategic issues, including publishing across different academic cultures, building international research visibility, multilingualism, intercultural communication within research teams, and new academic literacies emerging in response to artificial intelligence, authorship, ethics, and the relationship between human and machine voices.
Natalia Ursul opened the conversation on global communication with the idea of how practice-oriented educational programmes can go beyond the academic text. One example of this is visual research: the documentary film Tell Me, Guru!, created by students and professors of the Media Communications programme during a trip to India in 2023.
The trip and the filmmaking process were presented by Mikhail Tyurkin, head of the programme. The trip was preceded by thorough preparation — students studied books on cross-cultural communication and the specifics of Indian culture.
Mikhail Tyurkin
"It helped us not only with the content and drafting the questions for the film's protagonists. If you come prepared, you are able to improvise, to be flexible, and to adapt. When making a film, that is just as important as sticking to the script".
Prior to the trip, the team formulated a hypothesis which they later managed to confirm: the concept of the guru — teacher and mentor — extends beyond religion and spiritual practices and finds its reflection in the economy, culture, art, and even information technology. Professor Gauri Chakraborty of Bennett University (India) backed the hypothesis with a personal example: "I never paid a single rupee to my Guru. He became my third parent".
The filmmakers consciously avoided two extremes: showcasing negative stereotypes and slipping into colonial orientalism. Instead, they turned to mandalas and colour symbolism, structuring the film's visual space in accordance with Indian traditions and striving to build a dialogue of cultures. The film premiered a week later.
The next presentation shifted the focus from formats to research publication. Professor Nadežda Stojković of the University of Niš (Serbia), also the founder and editor-in-chief of the prestigious academic journal Journal of Teaching English for Specific and Academic Purposes (indexed in Web of Science and Scopus), began her talk Shaping Academic Visibility in a Fragmented Global System with a striking statistic: 88% of scientific publications belong to large corporations. Under these circumstances, how can a researcher influence their citation index and place their work in international outlets? Professor Stojković introduced the concept of academic visibility: Q1 and Q2 journals, much like exclusive clubs, are often inaccessible to scholars from countries outside the traditional academic centres. The fragmentation of science is further exacerbated by geopolitics and linguistic inequality. The speaker suggested acting strategically.
Nadežda Stojković
"What matters is metadata literacy; the field you specialize in, the degree and depth to which it has been explored; a focus on quality over quantity; and the creation and maintenance of your academic profile in the digital space".
The professor shared her own experience: when she was founding the Journal of Teaching English for Specific and Academic Purposes, some colleagues recommended publishing articles from a single region to raise the index. In the end, Nadežda Stojković took a different path, concentrating on quality and the geographic diversity of the published materials, which, according to the speaker, allowed the journal to enter the Web of Science database within just two years.
The talk also touched on the topic of AI in research. From her editorial experience, Professor Stojković noted that texts not written by a human are still easy to spot. They tend to feature an unnaturally sophisticated level of language and a string of impeccably constructed yet semantically hollow phrases.
The discussion on the use of artificial intelligence in research was continued by Anastasia Kolmogorova, Coordinator of the doctoral programme Theoretical, Applied, and Comparative Linguistics, Head of the Laboratory for Language Convergence, and of the master's programme Language Technologies in Business and Education. The speaker presented the topic From the Library to Latent Space: Artificial Intelligence and the New Workflow of Scientific Research.
Anastasia Kolmogorova presented data from a survey in which five thousand researchers took part. Respondents from over 70 countries reported on how they use AI in their work: from writing to optimizing peer review and from research design to verification and modelling.
The speaker also highlighted AI Scientist, a system capable of guiding a researcher through the entire cycle: from hypothesis generation to coding, running experiments, and critically analysing the results. "The platform offers an end-to-end solution for those who wish to entrust all research processes to their AI," Anastasia Kolmogorova explained, but added, "Nevertheless, when conducting research, we have no right to make numerous errors, as this would compromise the validity and reproducibility of our work. We can ruin our reputation".
In Anastasia Kolmogorova's view, the researcher must always remain close to the model and take responsibility for the output. As an example of a safe symbiosis, she cited multi-agent systems where several AI agents examine a problem from different optics: one generates ideas, another reflects on them, a third ranks them, and a fourth produces an overview. Another important aspect of the talk was a study that analysed all papers published at the three leading conferences in linguistics — ACL, NAACL, and EMNLP — in 2024 and 2025.
Anastasia Kolmogorova
"Nearly 300 papers contained at least one HalluCitation — a reference to a non-existent source. Moreover, half of these were detected at EMNLP 2025, the most recent conference".
At the close of her presentation, the speaker offered four ground rules for conducting research in the age of AI, which one of the generative models helped her formulate: always verify references and citations; the results of the work are the researcher's responsibility; de-identify the context; and always openly declare at which stages of your work you used AI.
The expert sessions of the School of Arts and Humanities demonstrated that global academic communication today is not only about publishing in international scholarly journals but also about a readiness to translate meanings from one cultural code to another — be it a documentary film, discussions about the scholar's place in the digital space, or work with the monuments of the past. At the centre of every conversation, the human being invariably remained. A human who checks references, takes responsibility for the outcome, and builds bridges where algorithms are still searching for a foothold. It is this very combination of academic depth, cultural sensitivity, and technological awareness that shapes the modern specialist: open, flexible, and ready to work anywhere in the world.