The paper discusses the early period of historical knowledge and historical education concentrating attention on the figure of the first historian of the Moscow University.
The author investigates how various themes, including mutual interaction, territory delimitation and key periods in Russian history are presented both in contemporary Chinese history textbooks for secondary schools and Russianist literature for wide readership that had been published in China during 1997-2008. The author emphasizes the peculiar perception of Russian history in China and considers it most important factor for creation the image of Russia in contemporary PRC.
Visual sources play a growing role in historical studies as well as in teaching as they offer new routes to understanding the past. The ways to construct and define social problems as well as approaches to solving them varied in different periods of history. To do so, it is important to challenge an ideological base of such concepts that often are taken-for-granted, to learn how to consider images as a means to conceive the world, as an important form of social knowledge. What are the differences on men’s and women’s labor in care work? How these distinctions were represented in certain sources and for which purposes? Photographs and episodes from the films, posters and cartoons depicting various images of men and women in the roles of parents, tutors, social care workers, nurses can be used not just as illustrations or representations but also as an important element of a studied context – as important as official documents or personal narratives. The aim of this lecture is to contribute to social work training by providing an overview of experiences, theories and methodologies on the visual, by collecting and building knowledge based on visual material and demonstrating its relevance to the study of human behavior, social networks and welfare policies.
Leo Tolstoy and Max Weber on value neutrality of university research The problem of value neutrality of science is considered on the basis of works by Leo Tolstoy and Max Weber. In the first part of the article, the statements on the value neutrality of scientific knowledge and university teaching by Weber and Tolstoy are made explicit and analyzed in a comparative perspective. In the second part, the central problem of Tolstoy and Weber, that is, a rational choice of the value paradigm, is studied systematically. Differences in their assumptions and conclusions are shown. In the third part, a historical commentary to the context of Tolstoys and Webers works is given. The works are treated as episodes in a wider modern history of the value neutralization of the scientific knowledge and university teaching. The specifics of this process are tightly connected with the fundamental principles of the modern research university (the Humboldtian model of university).
Students' internet usage attracts the attention of many researchers in different countries. Differences in internet penetration in diverse countries lead us to ask about the interaction of medium and culture in this process. In this paper we present an analysis based on a sample of 825 students from 18 Russian universities and discuss findings on particularities of students' ICT usage. On the background of the findings of the study, based on data collected in 2008-2009 year during a project "A сross-cultural study of the new learning culture formation in Germany and Russia", we discuss the problem of plagiarism in Russia, the availability of ICT features in Russian universities and an evaluation of the attractiveness of different categories of ICT usage and gender specifics in the use of ICT.
The paper examines the structure, governance, and balance sheets of state-controlled banks in Russia, which accounted for over 55 percent of the total assets in the country's banking system in early 2012. The author offers a credible estimate of the size of the country's state banking sector by including banks that are indirectly owned by public organizations. Contrary to some predictions based on the theoretical literature on economic transition, he explains the relatively high profitability and efficiency of Russian state-controlled banks by pointing to their competitive position in such functions as acquisition and disposal of assets on behalf of the government. Also suggested in the paper is a different way of looking at market concentration in Russia (by consolidating the market shares of core state-controlled banks), which produces a picture of a more concentrated market than officially reported. Lastly, one of the author's interesting conclusions is that China provides a better benchmark than the formerly centrally planned economies of Central and Eastern Europe by which to assess the viability of state ownership of banks in Russia and to evaluate the country's banking sector.