22

In a recent post for THE, I show how negative experience of bureaucracy and critical English-language literature reinforce scholars’ scepticism towards research ethics committees. The piece published by THE is available here. Below, I present a slightly longer version with a number of additional references: “The best interview is an unethical one.” This was not an opinion I expected to hear from a panel discussing the ethics of interview-based research in sociology. The panel was organised as

March

2018

22

Can music be a form of describing or knowing politics? The famous Symphony No. 7 by Dmitri Shostakovich has undoubtedly been mired in politics: purportedly dedicated to Lenin in its inception; performed in the US and the United Kingdom before it was premièred in Leningrad during the city’s siege by Nazi forces; then becoming a more or less international symbol of resistance to Nazism. Its rich wartime history involves smuggling the piece to Tehran. More importantly, however, many claim the

January

2018

05

Libraries - those centres of scholarship and repositories of knowledge - Imperial Russia could not go without one. Especially at the time when it was ruled by a monarch deeply concerned with her image of an enlightened sovereign. Catherine the Great, of course, assembled a vast personal library. Among her acquisitions were entire libraries she purchased in Europe, including those of the French philosophers Voltaire and Denis Diderot. As Susan Jaques tells us, the empress acquired the only

December

2017

11

Most of us would agree that first-hand knowledge of events is trustworthy. We expect a reporter to describe events objectively since he/she saw them with their own eyes. However, long before the post-truth era, the example of American reporting on the Revolution of 1917 cast a shadow of a doubt on this ideal of objective reporting. David S. Foglesong, at a fascinating conference Americans in Revolutionary Petrograd, illustrated how specific preconceptions clouded the judgement of some American

October

2017

08

Mapping has always been an important way of getting to know things. Never more so than during the times of imperial expansion, when maps were expected to provided knowledge about land, its topography, resources and people. Mapping was also a powerful symbolic expression of a possession claim. Many books have been written about the Russian explorers of Central Asia. But when we take a closer look, it becomes clear - and fascinating at the same time - how internationalised and multicultural the

October

2017