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Regular version of the site

Adolescents in small towns and rural areas

Kaluga oblast, Maloyaroslavets (7-20 July 2018).

We have fabulous news: our Laboratory is bringing back student expeditions! For eight years our laboratory had been organising student expeditions to small Russian cities and villages to study social inequality, educational trajectories and local communities. Since then we have taken a three-year break to take a deep breath and reflect on our experiences. But this summer we are going to embark on an expedition again. This time we will have more fresh topics and participants.

The expedition is dedicated to studying various aspects of life of adolescents. Together with their senior colleagues from the Laboratory students will head to one of the cities in Kaluga oblast for two weeks to study the life of the local community in general and the local teenagers in particular. We will be looking to answer the following questions: What unites the locals? What social problems do they have? What mechanism is maintaining social order in the city and the village? All this creates the social context, in which various practices of adolescents are formed. We will also study the characteristics of risk behavior of local adolescents, as well as practices of using mobile games and social media.

Members of the expedition will gain experience in fieldwork. They will learn how to conduct interviews and observations properly, and will understand how to analyze the materials collected. The main thing they will acquire will be qualitative research skills passed on by their senior colleagues in a completely different atmosphere outside the classroom walls. They will also have unlimited access to senior colleagues and will be able to discuss all possible questions. There has not yet been a single student who’s regretted gaining this hands-on experience of being a part of a research expedition. To see feedback from our previous expeditions please, see the link.

If you are ready for some summer adventures, choose expedition at the ‘Project fair’ section, read the terms of participation carefully and prepare a motivation letter.