Reformatting Research Activity: First Large-Scale Projects Launched at HSE University
Less than a year ago, the Faculty of Humanities at HSE University launched four large-scale projects, bringing together representatives of different disciplines from different departments and campuses of the University. Their goals, content, staffing and expected results were presented at a meeting of the Rector’s Council. Other departments have been tasked with developing their own large-scale projects, which HSE University will be able to include in its application for the ‘Priority 2030’ programme.
‘We are launching the HSE University development programme aimed at partially reformatting academic activity,’ Yaroslav Kuzminov, HSE University Rector, opened the discussion. The launch of large-scale projects, envisaged by the Programme of HSE Development up to 2030, began at the Faculty, which is considered the most difficult faculty for organising collaborative work, he noted. But these projects will affect everyone at the University.
In preparing the first projects, a clear research programme was formed, and colleagues had to understand that a large scale project is not just a big topic like ‘October in Art’, for example, for which anything can be written. It's about creating a new toolkit, a database, a specific methodology for other researchers. ‘That is, we are creating a public domain for the researcher,’ said Yaroslav Kuzminov.
A large-scale project should be understandable to people beyond academic research and sought by practitioners, the Rector of HSE University stressed. If scientists invent a moonwalker, they should present it – ‘here you go — it walks, makes some noises, rolls its wheels, and it is immediately obvious that they did not do it in vain.’ There is a ‘moonwalker problem’ in the humanities and social sciences — it is not easy to present concrete research results, but there are solutions. ‘We have been looking for them for a long time, and we will continue looking for them,’ the Rector added.
According to HSE University Vice Rector Maria Yudkevich, large projects serving as an add-on to the existing research landscape at the University will help to overcome the fragmentation of individual colleagues and individual teams.
Multidisciplinary, inter-faculty and inter-campus distributed teams will be formed, which can be joined at different stages by other colleagues interested in their agenda
So far, there are no specific policies regarding the endeavour; the experiment is underway, and the normative framework for large projects will be shaped as empirical experience is accumulated.
Ekaterina Entina, HSE University Deputy Vice Rector, responsible for the development and integration of project activity, added that large-scale projects should have an open result: with common outlines and a final goal, academic freedom should be maintained. Students of all levels, from undergraduate to postgraduate, are expected to be involved in large-scale projects. This will help them gain not only professional but also interdisciplinary competencies.
The interdisciplinary approach to large-scale projects will be realised through open entry for any interested researchers to participate through open workshops. ‘Literally, this means the following — we understand the core of the team and are responsible for the final results. We understand who performs some of the projects in 2021 and partly in 2022. But we assume that, starting from January 2022, new colleagues from all campuses representing different interdisciplinary areas will be involved in these projects,’ Ekaterina Entina explained.
Four large-scale projects of the Faculty of Humanities were presented to the Rector’s Council by Faculty leadership.
The project ‘Social Anthropology of Late USSR Institutions’ envisages forming a functional model of the institutions of the late USSR as a specific ‘party-state-enterprise’ type of governance system. The outcome will be a database of late Soviet institutions, on the basis of which it is planned to develop a system of recommendations in relation to the modern system of governance, which has inherited many features of the Soviet era, but has lost a number of effective practices.
The project ‘Literature as Cultural Practice and Social Experience’ examines how literature, through various institutions and practices, influences the formation of values, identities, and landmarks. The final product will be a digital platform for the study of literary production and consumption practices. The project plans to use iFORA, a big data mining system developed by the Institute for Statistical Studies and Economics of Knowledge.
The ‘Speech Practices’ Project explores the gap between the thought process and the communicative process, using a cross-section of speech practices in the Russian language as an example. These include, for example, metalanguage, which allows for accurate expression of content when writing laws, but is poorly understood by those who do not write laws; or pseudo-speech, when an article is written in academic words, but has no content, using metalanguage to confuse the reader. The product of the project will be a set of databases on communicative failures in contemporary Russian and the political, economic, social, cognitive, and other effects they generate.
Finally, the ‘Applied Ethics’ project aims to systematise and qualitatively expand the issues surrounding ethical research at HSE University through the synergy of basic moral research and applied development of regulatory mechanisms of ethical interaction in different social and professional environments. The final product will be an interdisciplinary methodology for improving the efficiency of governance, legal regulation, and conducting business based on ethical imperatives. A set of recommendations will be prepared for public authorities, businesses, and other users.
The projects presented were diverse. ‘This suggests that large-scale projects should not contain a very rigid framework,’ said Ekaterina Entina. ‘In the future, projects will be shaped by their substantive cores and the results we would like to achieve. Therefore, their expressions in form may vary widely.’
As Yaroslav Kuzminov said, the developments of the Faculty of Humanities are the beginning of a journey, ‘an encouraging start to large-scale projects on very unfamiliar ground.’
Yaroslav Kuzminov
Over the next year, we need to identify the whole set of large-scale projects that we will be able to implement. When we form the application for the ‘Priority 2030’ programme, we will include large-scale projects in it, because the logic behind this programme is exactly what we call large-scale projects. Everyone has already believed that colleagues from Russian universities can publish, but now we also need a ‘national economic contribution’, as the Bolsheviks used to say — the contribution of science and research, the university's contribution to other sectors of life. This always leaves a lot of room for imagination, and its practical implementation can be quite difficult.
The Rector’s Council recommended that heads of faculties, departments, schools and research units study the experience of the Faculty of Humanities in their teams and submit proposals for the development and implementation of new large projects in the coming weeks.