Anthropology of Knowledge and Migration; Emotionalization and therapeutic culture; Post-Soviet culture in Russia and in Israel; Cultural Translation

My main intellectual interests are anthropology of knowledge and migration. At the intersection of these fields, I explore both the relocation of people and the translation of ideas. My first research was already dedicated to migrant students and their identity shaped through the acquisition of academic knowledge of host society (MA, 1999). My doctoral dissertation (2008) based on a long-term fieldwork on St. Petersburg dealt with the post-Soviet translation of social knowledge through the constitution of the new academic culture in post-Soviet Russia. Since then, I developed the trajectories of inquiry into ‘cultural translation’ that delves deeper into the post-Soviet culture in Russia and beyond, in the Russian-speaking immigrant diaspora in Israel and in Europe. 

Committed as I am to anthropology, my intellectual credo is also wide and interdisciplinary with respect to methodologies and types of inquiry. The approach that I have developed through my studies is the ‘ethnography of knowledge’ as an attempt to examine knowledge as a process taking place at many levels of social reality, and to include within it practices of knowledge construction and the modes of its transfer and interpretation.

My recent research interest and activity turns to domains of anthropology of emotions, psychological and cognitive anthropology, emotional knowledge and cultural Selves. Working through juxtaposition of different empirical contexts (Russian, Israeli, American and European) I am concern with processes of what I call an “emotionalization” of culture and seek to conceptualize the transformative role of psychologized emotional logics and rhetoric that are coming to dominate nowadays not only a private sphere but also public institutional fields, domains of expertise, the production of knowledge and also politics.  In my fieldwork research conducted for several years and supported by the fund of the “Post-Soviet translations of the therapeutic culture in Russian everyday life and media discourse “ (ISF GRANT NO. ­ 496\16) I trace the ways of cultural translation of emotional styles, psychological knowledge and therapeutic repertoires in the post-Soviet condition, uncovering how Russians today articulate their selfhood, emotional life and personal relationships; and also, how the new emotional culture shapes the public and political domain. The research included everyday ethnography, narrative ethnography, interview and text analysis, interpretation of media texts of different genres including TV and cinema production.

These days I continue collecting empirical materials more broadly enriching it by fieldwork beyond Russia, especially in the Israeli field there I work and live as well within international collaborations.  Working on a manuscript on emotionalization of culture, I am taking the exploration of emotional psychological logic further in order to understand its role in public and political institutions. First, I am interested in intensive process of reconstitution of the academic culture and academic subject in emotionalization of university and higher education globally. My second the most recent research concern turns to understand an incorporation of emotional psychological language in political discourse either authoritative, liberal, conservative and critical in Russia, in Israel and globally.  As I am working on this submission during the violent events of Russian invasion of Ukraine, I see a high relevance of my research to socio-cultural condition of nowadays.