New Affiliated Center ~ The Moscow Centre for Cultural Sociology

Congratulations to CCS Faculty Fellow Dmitry Kurakin and his team at the founding of the new Centre for Cultural Sociology in Moscow!

A new Centre for Cultural Sociology was established in Moscow this year, at the Higher School of Economics. Headed by CCS faculty fellow Dmitry Kurakin, the Centre will be focusing primarily on cultural dimensions of inequality, in education and wider life, and the various ways in which culture informs individuals’ identities, perceptions, rationales, actions, preferences, aspirations and decision-making patterns. In the course of these studies, MCCS aims to contribute to advancing the emerging agenda of making inequality studies more culturally-centered. This work involves a particular attention to such issues as the emotional dimension of culture, metaphors, narratives, temporality and their role in social life. The Centre’s work thus connects with other existing studies of the MCCS team, which are focused on the sacred, mystery, religion, the body, medicalization and sport, among others. These and others empirical inquiries are heavily driven by theoretical concerns in the contexts of the most vibrant contemporary debates, such as those regarding culture and cognition, structured versus fragmented character of culture, prospects of formal methods of analysis of culture, and others.

The Centre has developed out of a previously existing laboratory within the Institute of Education, which, in turn, has succeeded and subsumed the Cultural Sociological Research Group within the Centre of Fundamental Sociology at the HSE, which had been CCS’s affiliated group since 2010.

From 2021, the Centre launches a workshop series in cultural sociology, gaining inspiration from the CCS Workshop. Regularly, there are openings for post-doctoral and assistant professor positions in Cultural Sociology with the Centre.