New, but Already Successful

On November 25^th a reporting conference of the HSE Laboratory for Comparative Social Research (LCSR) on ‘Comparative Sociology in Quantitative Perspective’ was held at the HSE.

 Video of the conference

The Laboratory was founded in November after the announcement of the winners of the Russian Government’s grant for state support of scientific research conducted under the supervision of leading scientists in Russian universities. Research at the LCSR is carried out under the supervision of Ronald Inglehart, organizer and President of the World Values Survey Association (WVSA), as well as Eduard Ponarin, Professor at the Laboratory,  Christian Welzel, Vice President of the WVSA, and Daniil Alexandrov, Leading Research Fellow at the Laboratory and Deputy Director for Research at the HSE Saint Petersburg Branch.

According to Vadim Radaev, First Vice Rector of the HSE, who spoke at the opening session of the conference, this international laboratory is a new experience for the Higher School of Economics. But it is clearly already successful, with research involving both Russian and international researchers, and has attracted many young scientists. The latter fact is particularly satisfying for Ronald Inglehart, as he mentioned in his welcoming speech to conference participants. Eduard Ponarin expressed his gratitude to the HSE administration for their organizational support and emphasized that the LCSR project is particularly relevant because of its focus on development.

During all four plenary sessions, which were concerned with values, subjective wealth and modernization, presentations were made by researchers both from different cities across Russia (Moscow, Saint Petersburg, Krasnoyarsk, Samara) and from other countries (Belarus, Germany, Japan, USA).

At the first plenary session, the group considered various issues related to economic and social aspects of migration from East Asia. Kazuhiro Kumo, Professor at the Hitotsubashi University (Tokyo), gave a presentation on ‘Migrants from Tajikistan and their Deportations to the Motherland: How Poor are Tajik Guest Workers?’ Daniil Alexandrov, Professor at the Saint Petersburg branch of the HSE, spoke about the problems that the children of migrants have when trying to adapt to Russian schools. Olga Kamenchuk, Director for Communications at the Russian Public Opinion Research Center (VCIOM), unveiled her view of the well established but still relevant problem of ‘brain drain’, in her presentation entitled ‘Brain Drain: European and Post-Soviet Scenarios’.

For more information about the conference, please visit the LCSR website.

 

Andrey Shcherbakov, HSE News Service

Photos by Nikita Benzoruk