Publications

This article describes the normative system that attempts to regulate online behaviour in the sphere of premarital romantic relationships of the second-generation migrants whose parents came to Russia from societies of the South Caucasus which regulate female behaviour more strictly. Based on a mixed-method study, which included a survey, a series of semi-structured interviews and digital ethnography, we describe the norms as well as the means by which they are enforced. We show that this normative system is rooted in the cultural concept of namus, which regulates the behaviour of females, while the control function is imposed mainly on their male relatives. We argue however, that these norms are widely circumvented and e-namus (manifestation of namus on the web) can barely prevent second-generation migrant females from having online romance. This brings about a radical change in gender relations altogether. The article contributes to the literature related to offline-online normative transfer, online dating, second-generation migrants’ romantic relationships and intergenerational value change.

Contributing to literature on composition of social ties of migrants, this article argues that “co-ethnic” ties, often included into analysis as a homogeneous entity, are either the ones obtained in the sending society, thus connecting a migrant to his relatives and neighbors from the community of origin, or the ones acquired in the receiving society and connecting people from different parts of the sending country. Basing on results of a survey of Kyrgyz migrants in Moscow, the authors show that this distinction is associated with difference in patterns, such as economic advancement, attitude toward ethnic category of belonging, and remitting behavior, which together comprise specific modes of integration for migrants. The explanations of these differences are suggested. Also, the mechanism of change of prevalent type of co-ethnic ties in migrants’ ego-networks from “homeland-rooted” to acquired in the receiving society is described.

The report presents an approach to the filtration of alternatives when choosing a counterparty for horizontal cooperation based on multiple criteria. Filtration procedures precede the optimization procedures for multi-criteria decisions. The filtration is based on the theory of binary relations and preserves only alternatives-majorants in relation to a strict order according to a given criterion. Presented approach eliminates ineffective alternatives without significant quality degradation of the resulting choice. These procedures are implemented in a numerical example for the following generalized selection criteria: scalar; ideal point; geometric mean.

Memory narratives commonly include characters such as heroes (triumphant or fallen), martyrs, perpetrators, and victims. In recent years, the victim has become the central character in the dominant, western-centric, and globalized memory culture. A victim’s definition is problematic: few existing memory narratives include “ideal,” or innocent victims who suffered meaninglessly. The lines between victims and other characters in memory narratives are blurry in many cases, for instance, between a victim and a perpetrator. Using the case of Russian museums dedicated to the Soviet repressions, I study the problematic relation between victims and heroes, adding to the discussion of the victim character’s complexity. Often, victims of Soviet repressions are presented as both victims of political persecution and heroes who did not just suffer through their imprisonment but continued to live productive and creative lives. The resulting victim-hero character indicates that the category of a victim is too limiting and adds to calls for the theorization of victim taxonomy.

The geocultural space of any region is formed as a result of the interaction of two weakly separable elements – geocultures developing in the given territory and cultural landscapes. The full development of a geocultural space involves the formation of a unique ontology of imagination, which creates a cognitive “foundation” for the construction of appropriate models. Ontological models of imagination characterize the possibilities of an expanded representation and interpretation of the cultural landscapes of a region. The visuality of a cultural landscape is a complex formation in which visual reactions and reflections are the result of multiple imaginations – both personal and group. The geocultural space of the Arctic, in its visual-discursive dimension, is complex, since the tradition of the “colonial view”, coupled with the tendencies to analyze postcolonial practices and to decolonize various Arctic discourses, creates an ambivalent discursive field of relevant visual practices and policies. The existential situation of post-exoticism, typologically characteristic of the Arctic regions, is a field of ontologization of multiple visual practices that consolidate rhizomatic procedures of geocultural distinctions. As a result of a field study of the coastal territories of North-Eastern Chukotka, the most visually intensive key landscape assemblages have been identified: 1) sea hunting, 2) traditional holidays of sea hunters, 3) “pristine” nature. Landscape assemblages are represented by various visual dispositives. Visual dispositives are understood as consistently reproducing and phenomenologically fixed visual landscape (geocultural) images that characterize the specifics of certain landscape assemblages. As a result of the study, five key visual dispositives have been identified that determine the specific forms of the reproduction and development of both geo-cultures themselves and the corresponding cultural landscapes of these territories: 1) the dispositive of sea hunters, the most borderline and fractal; 2) the dispositive of holidays of the traditional culture of sea hunters; 3) the dispositive of destruction and ruin associated with both the extreme natural conditions of the region and the era of the Soviet and post- Soviet development; 4) the dispositive of the “natural”, “pristine” space associated with the low development of the territory, and 5) the dispositive of multinaturalism, manifested in the features of the visual environments of Chukchi settlements (villages, urban-type settlements, small towns). These dispositives, intertwining and interacting, create multiple, constantly transforming landscape assemblages. Within the framework of the presented visual dispositives, the phenomena of Arctic post-exoticism and internal exoticism are formed, which fix the impossibility of returning to the pre-colonial “landscape optics”.

Literary texts can be considered as the most attractive research material for analyzing the key features of both the semiotics of the city as a whole and the semiotics of individual cities, to which many works of art are devoted. The urban space of Modernity as a result of the processes of powerful semiotization can be considered as both textual and intertextual. The intertextuality of Modern urban spaces presupposes sets of "floating" topological signifiers corresponding to similar sets of "floating" topological signs. In the traditional semiotics of the city, the existence of two realities is assumed – the "real" reality and the "semiotic" reality, between which clear logical correspondences and/or relations can be observed and analyzed. The appearance of non-classical / post-classical urban narratives focused on the problems of dis-communication at the beginning of the XX century became one of the important signs of the primary formation of the phenomena of post-city and post-urbanism. The post-city is not a text and cannot be considered as a text; at the same time, it can generate separate texts that are not related to each other in any way. Post-urban texts, which are the communicative results of specific co-spatialities, remain local "flashes" that do not form a single text or meta-text (super-text). Hetero-textuality is a phenomenon of post-urban reality, which is characterized by the coexistence, as a rule, of texts that do not correlate with each other, relating to certain stable urban loci. Trans-semiotics in the general context is understood as the study of any texts that involve the creation of sign-symbolic breaks or "gaps" with any other potentially possible correlating texts in the process of signification. Trans-semiotics of post-cities are studies of (artistic) texts that involve the creation of sign-symbolic breaks or "gaps" with any other potentially possible correlating texts related to a particular urban locus in the process of signifying any urban loci. The heterostructuality of a post-city can be considered as the co-spatiality of mutually exclusive texts corresponding to "non-seeing" post-city loci. Post-urban trans-semiotics in the course of their development form a kind of "dark zones" that reject or neutralize any attempt at any semiotic interpretation.

Throughout the period after the municipal reform in 2003, the governing of Russian cities has been changing. A city as an object of governance is located at the intersection of interests of different levels of public authorities and is not limited only to local authorities This article investigates how budget autonomy of Russian cities has been changing for the last 16 years, and how exogenous economic shocks and large-scale federal initiatives such as the “May Decrees” have influenced the budget autonomy of Russian cities. The paper considers a hypothesis that there was a transition to multi-level governance of Russian cities in 2006–2019, which led to significant reduction of the budget autonomy. Budgets of the 35 largest cities of Russia (except for city-regions like Moscow and Saint Petersburg) were collected and analyzed in terms of their revenue and expenditure sections to test the proposed hypothesis. The relationship between the economic level of development and budget sufficiency was investigated with cluster analysis. The main result of this research is that Russian cities have become dependent on the financial grants from regional governments since there is no national policy of stimulating the economic development of cities. The national economic crisis of 2014 accelerated the process of governance centralization. In addition, the budget autonomy of municipalities was reduced due to the fact that achieving indicators of the May Decrees had become the primary objective for the public authorities. The share of the income tax in local budgets increased significantly although the share and diversity of other income sources decreased.

The article continues the topic of good neighborliness as an important direction for the development of neighboring and local communities. It is devoted to practical issues and social technologies of good-neighborliness, primarily the use of good-neighborly technologies in the modern housing sector, and, especially, in the housing and utility sector, given the important changes that have occurred there in the last 15 years after the adoption of the Housing Code of the Russian Federation, fi rst of all — the emergence of private management organizations and new "collective customers" — residents of apartment buildings. The activity of modern management organizations, introducing their own "rules of good neighborliness" in the management of modern apartment complexes in Kirov, Nizhny Novgorod and other cities, is considered as a new model of the activity of the educational institution.  

In this small essay the experience of the Group members in holding an exhibition on migration is described and an agenda related to opening a full-scale museum of migration in Moscow is set.

Article presents an analysis of the efficiency of the joint use of vehicles of different types in the supply of goods for the EOQ-model considering one product nomenclature and the lease of storage locations. The analysis takes into account factors important for practical applications: 1) cargo capacity of vehicles; 2) the time value of money; 3) offered discounts on the cost of joint deliveries. The admissible levels of discounts for the efficiency of joint deliveries are assessed. For any set of vehicles, a necessary and sufficient condition (with respect to such a discount) has been established, under which combined deliveries will be more effective than deliveries by one vehicle with the best efficiency.

The report examines the problems of managing return flows, taking into account the modern requirements of urban ecosystems and the companies’ de-velopment strategies. Various approaches to multicriteria optimization of the config-uration of the return flow logistics network to find a balance between economic effi-ciency and sustainability of a city are discussed

The article discusses special issues related to the optimization of the choice of a counterparty according to many criteria for horizontal cooperation problems that may arise in practice when analyzing models of transport provision of supplies. The structure and possibilities of formalizing tasks of this type are analyzed. It is shown that the approaches and methods for making multicriteria decisions developed in theory will make it possible in the format of such problems to really ensure the choice (as the best / optimal solution) of those analyzed alternatives that may be of interest to a decision-maker (DM) if they are Pareto optimal. In this case we recommend to take into account existing theoretical methods and mathematical tools that effectively allow manager to adapt the choice to the DM’s preferences. The illustrations are given using generalized selection criteria: scalar, geometric mean, ideal point and Hurwitz criterion for various positions of decision makers' preferences