International Students in Moscow: Visual and Anthropological Analysis

Today, attracting students from other countries is one of the key goals faced by Russian educational institutions. As a result, foreign students, most of whom come to Russia from the CIS countries, and various aspects of their life in Russia are becoming a subject of scientific interest. Often, the social life of foreign students, satisfaction from studying, personal perception of the prospects of education and the possibility of finding a job, as well as the attitude of foreign students to the problems associated with migration, remain unexplored. Our research is dedicated to the studying of personal attitude of foreign students to migration and accommodation in a new country. As part of our research, we created several videos based on the approach of anthropologist and director Jean Rouch. This approach, used in the framework of visual anthropology, is called shared anthropology and involves the joint creation of a film project by research participants and the researcher. Due to the lack of voices of the ‘objects’ of research and because of a monopoly of the position of researchers, nowadays, in Russian studies and in the educational environment, foreign students are viewed from the perspective of the host society as objects of benefit for the educational, political and economic spheres. Foreign students from the CIS countries are also attributed with a different way of life and other cultural differences. Using the methods of visual anthropology, and shared anthropology in particular, we can personalize stories of the researched communities, make the presence of the Other voices possible, transform the place of those who are called ‘research objects’ to the position of agents interacting with the researcher to form their own representation.