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Research / Politics/ Society

Public Sociology Laboratory (PS Lab) is an autonomous research group focusing on politics and society in Russia and post-Soviet region in comparative perspective.

Public Sociology Laboratory was established in 2011. Back then, following the start of the mass protests in Russia in December 2011, the PS Lab team started their research on protests and social movements in Russia, which subsequently expanded to include other post-Soviet regions. But PS Lab has a backstory too. Some of its members first met in 2007 as part of the OD Group—a student movement fighting for the quality of education at the Department of Sociology, Moscow State University.

Since its establishment, PS Lab has included many more members and launched dozens of new research projects. PS Lab researchers have defended candidate (kandidat) and Ph.D. degrees in social and political sciences and are currently working on a number of collective and individual projects on a variety of topics such as civic politics, media, state, and labor.

In March 2024, the Russian Ministry of Justice designated the Public Sociology Laboratory as a "foreign agent." The participants of the Laboratory consider the law on foreign agents to be a politically motivated and repressive measure. The foreign agent status, of course, complicates the activities of the Laboratory. We are facing new bureaucratic challenges, the necessity of labeling our publications, and it will be more difficult for us to conduct fieldwork—not to mention the individual risks many of us now face. However, we believe it is important to continue using social sciences to support public discourse—especially today. Therefore, we will continue to do what we have been doing.

Mission

The main goal of the Public Sociology Laboratory is to combine public relevance, methodological rigour, and theoretical depth in research. We believe that the traditional academic distinction between scholarship and political commitment is a false dilemma and that there is no neutral, objective, and apolitical knowledge.

Principles

Our approach is based on combining a socially engaged approach with contemporary discussions in social and political theory and seeking to address theoretical questions via empirical research. In their work, PS Lab members follow several basic principles: political relevance and theoretical depth of research questions, professionalism in empirical analysis, and the use of results to communicate to the broader public and maintain informed public discussion.

We also share a number of broader epistemological beliefs. First, we believe that researchers should be aware of their own political assumptions and preoccupations rather than unbiased or uninvolved. True academic knowledge can be achieved only through recognizing and taking into account one's own politically-engaged stance. Having political commitments without methodology means to be a politician, while to have a methodology without such a bias means to be an empty positivist. Thus, the goal of the laboratory is to find methodologically firm ground for socially- and politically-engaged knowledge. Second, we believe that it is important to address the issues that have both social and theoretical importance. Namely, the PS Lab aims at grounding the issues of "higher philosophy" in solid empirical data. Finally, PS Lab attempts to move knowledge beyond academic discussions and make it a part of public debate.

Areas of research

1
Social movements, wars, revolutions, and protests
2
Political economy of authoritarian regimes
3
Labor under neoliberal capitalism
4
Political communication and political cognition of individuals and groups
5
Russian society in wartime

By bringing together researchers with different disciplinary backgrounds—sociologists, political scientists, psychologists, and researchers well-versed in various approaches to data analysis—PS Lab combines various theoretical approaches and methods in its empirical research.

Major projects of recent years


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Methods and data

All PS Lab projects are based on large empirical datasets—mostly qualitative, such as interviews, observations, and focus groups. Some participants also rely on quantitative methods, such as surveys, experiments, and computational social media analysis.

In addition to empirically grounded research, PS Lab also collaborates with civic and political activist groups, as well as social and political democratic movements.

Publications

publications' covers

In collaboration with researchers from EUSP and St. Petersburg State University, PS Lab has published a collective monograph The Politics of Apoliticals: Civic Movements in Russia in 2011-13 (in Russian, Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2015). The monograph is still considered to be one of the main sources on protest politics in contemporary Russia. In addition, since the beginning of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, PS Lab has been conducting a qualitative study of Russians' perceptions of the war.

Researchers from PS Lab have published their research in a variety of Russian and international peer-reviewed academic journals, such as Political Communication, American Journal of Cultural Sociology, Sociological Forum, Current Sociology, Journal of Youth Studies, International Sociology, Post-Soviet Affairs, Europe-Asia Studies, Sociologicheskie Issledovania, Sociologia Vlasti, Sociologicheskoe obozrenie, Journal of Social Policy Studies, and many others.

Public Sociology Laboratory's members also regularly publish media articles and take to the radio to present the results of their research for a broader audience. All PS Lab publications can be found in «Projects».

Teaching experience

PS Lab members have had experience teaching at King's College London, University of Bremen, University of Wisconsin-Madison, the North-West Institute of Management RANEPA (St. Petersburg, Russia), Ural Federal University (Ekaterinburg, Russia), Narxoz University (Almaty, Kazakhstan), Tyumen State University (Tyumen, Russia), and other universities.

Reasons to get in touch with us

1
To invite a member to give a public lecture
2
To invite a member to appear as an expert on one of the laboratory's areas of research
3
To invite a member to teach a course
4
To commission a study
5
To propose or ask something we could not think of in advance