Winter School of the Faculty of Social Sciences
On January 31st – February 3rd 2016, the Winter School of the Faculty of Social Sciences was held by 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.
Politics
The second day of the school started with a lecture by Boris Makarenko, Professor at the School of Political Science. The lecture was dedicated to the Russian political institutions that determine the political climate in our country. The speaker also gave his forecast for the upcoming Duma elections in 2016 and presidential elections in 2018.
The school participants also met master’s students of the programmes in political science. Anastasia Samorodova and Evgeniya Skoptsova, first-year students, presented the master’s programme in Applied Politics, which is taught in Russian. The students spoke about the advantages of the programme and the admission procedure.
Freya Johanna Horn and Lucas Aaron Michael Feinäugle, students from Germany, presented the English language programme ‘Politics. Economics. Philosophy’. Both students graduated from the University of Tübingen. They decided to study on the HSE master’s programme in order to get a broader view of economics and politics. The students agreed that is it hard to separate both concepts from each other as well as to analyze them without a philosophical background, and the master’s programme ‘Politics. Economics. Philosophy’ helps them to study the subject thoroughly.
Freya Johanna and Lucas Aaron Michael considered enrolling on similar programmes in German universities, but they made their final choice in favour of the HSE master’s programme that has been taught in English since 2015. It is worth mentioning that both students speak Russian well and are continuing to improve their language skills.
Valeria Kasamara presented the Laboratory for Political Studies and spoke about current and past projects of the lab, its structure and staff members. Research projects on the values of different groups of Russian society aroused great interest among the audience.
The school participants also presented the results of their projects, suggested their anti-crisis programmes and took part in the discussion. After the presentation the participants were awarded with school certificates.
Sociology
The second day of the school for the students in sociology started with a presentation of the master’s programme in Demography. Anatoly Vishnevsky, Director of the Institute of Demography, spoke about the importance of demography and its influence on other disciplines, as well as answering questions from the audience.
Mikhail Denisenko, Head of the Department of Demography, told the participants about the programme. Ekaterina Mitrofanova, graduate of the programme, shared her experience of studying and career building.
After the coffee break, Christian Fröhlich presented the master’s programme ‘Comparative Social Research’. He described the advantages of this new programme (the first enrollment was in 2015) such as the opportunity to have an internship in Saint Petersburg. Then Eduard Ponarin, Head of the Laboratory for Comparative Social Research, delivered a lecture on the elites in Russia and on the lab’s comparative research projects.
Anna Almakaeva, Senior Research Fellow of the Laboratory for Comparative Social Research and Senior lecturer at the Faculty of Social Sciences organized the game ‘Gender Stereotypes in a cross-cultural perspective’, in which the participants tested stereotypes about the distribution of income in families, they suggested their own hypotheses and applied them to real life situations.
The participants had an opportunity to apply their knowledge and to analyze and interpret some elements of folklore such as the fairy tale about Kolobok froma sociological viewpoint.
At the end of the official part of the school, the participants were awarded certificates.