News

Waste sorting is recognized as the most effective way to deal with the world’s waste problem. Yet nearly 70% of Russians neither sort their garbage nor intend to.  But this is no reason to underestimate the population: 86% of Russians have adopted at least one of the habits outlined below to reduce household waste. Marina Shabanova studied the forms, motives, and potential of these practices. The results of the study will be presented at the 20th Annual April Conference at HSE.

Today, we have moved from the political concept of panem et circenses (bread and circuses) to keep the masses happy to the dangers of culture driven by spectacle and politics driven by algorithms. Post-war theoreticians of the crowd had personal experience of fascism, and today contemporary artists are attempting to address similar problems. During the XX April International Academic Conference on Economic and Social Development, scheduled this year for April 9-12 at the Higher School of Economics, Sarah Wilson, Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London, will explore some of these issues in her presentation 'Culture and Emigration, Crowds and Power.'

Redundancy and crisis — these are the words higher education experts Philip G. Altbach and Hans de Wit use to describe the situation in the global market of academic publications. It has been largely caused by external factors, such as the rise of university rankings that focus on the number of research and papers and pressure by publishers. But universities’ behavior is also an explanation for the crisis. Many of them try to imitate research universities and produce lots of publications of widely varying quality, the experts said in their paper in the HSE journal International Higher Education.

On April 2, Sonia Arribas, Senior Lecturer at Universitat Pompeu Fabra, will give a talk as part of the seminar ‘West and East: Universalism of Culture’ at the HSE International Laboratory for the Study of Russian and European Intellectual Dialogue. In her talk, Sonia Arribas will map out the various functions of the symbol of ‘bread’ in Piotr Kropotkin’s The Conquest of Bread.

At the upcoming 20^th April International Academic Conference, HSE’s new Institute for Agrarian Studies will hold a panel on the drivers of growth in the Russian agrarian sector. Johan Swinnen, Director of LICOS Center for Institutions and Economic Performance at KU Leuven, has been invited to speak at the panel.

While much of the focus on politics and global affairs over the past several decades has been on democratization, the most striking thing about this period has been the survival and spread of authoritarian regimes, argues Graeme Gill, Emeritus Professor in the Department of Government and International Relations at the University of Sydney. Professor Gill is one of the presenters at the upcoming XX April International Academic Conference on Economic and Social Development, scheduled this year for April 9-12 at the Higher School of Economics.

In October 2015, England introduced a charge for single-use plastic bags in supermarkets. The charge was largely supported by the population, led to substantial reduction in plastic bag use, and catalyzed a wider support for similar measures aimed at tackling plastic waste.

On March 22, HSE’s School of Psychology organized a talk by Professor Geoffrey Saxe, from Graduate School at UC Berkeley, on Cultural Development of Mathematical Ideas. The talk was based on the results of Prof. Saxe’s expedition to Papua New Guinea where he studied a remote Mountain Ok community. In his interview with HSE News Service Professor Saxe talks about his research.

Prof. Dr Thomas Dohmen from the Institute for Applied Microeconomics, University of Bonn, Germany is to deliver an honorary lecture at the upcoming April Academic Conference at HSE University April 9 – 12. HSE News Service spoke with Dr. Dohmen about his work on the Global Preferences Survey (GPS), an international survey of epic proportions that he helped develop and analyze in order to learn whether individuals differ in terms of economic preferences by country, and more.

Mobile and web-based applications available today allow patients to self-diagnose and self-prescribe treatment. Galina Polynskaya and Margarita Mesropyan have examined  to what extent patients and doctors trust such technology.