"As I Walk through the City, I Know that HSE is Everywhere": The Students' Perception of the Distributed Campus of the Higher School of Economics in Moscow

This study attempts to explain how students at the Moscow campus of the Higher School of Economics perceive and sense the space of a distributed campus. In particular, factors of the formation of the image of the corps, features of the physical and social space of the university, the presence of borders and ideas about the integrity and fragmentation of the campus and the university community are considered. To do this, 10 online focus groups on the Zoom platform were conducted and analyzed with students from 5 clusters of buildings of the Moscow campus (2 focus groups for each cluster). To form a complete picture of understanding, the drawing technique was used as an auxiliary tool for data collection. As a result of the analysis, various feelings and impressions arising for students in the university buildings, features and components of the image of the buildings, features of constructing a sense of unity and fragmentation of the campus and community, were identified, as well as the main types of visual images were identified. In addition, the work examines the methodological novelty of the online focus group method and proposes a name for this type of focused group interviews that have not been developed in Russian practice, namely, “remote focus groups”.