Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant: "Reproducing Russians": Population Science, Policy, and Kinship in 21st Century Russia

布朗大学博士生英娜·莱金将在丹尼尔·乔丹·史密斯博士的指导下，研究科学话语和国家政策如何影响公众对人口问题的理解以及个人和家庭文化。这项研究将在俄罗斯进行，那里最近出现了人口不足的危机感。尽管该国人口几十年来一直在迅速减少，但这种下降直到最近才成为社会科学家、政府当局和普通公众关注的问题。这位研究人员计划调查为什么这一长期的人口现象最近被诊断为一个需要解决的问题，谁的权威，以及俄罗斯公民如何看待治疗处方。莱金将在人口不断下降的大省会城市叶卡捷琳堡，在俄罗斯科学院经济研究所的人口部分进行参与者观察。她计划记录问题是如何构成的，干预措施是如何设计的，以及人们是如何接受这些干预措施的。她将与执行人口政策的公职人员和受新政策影响的普通公民进行访谈，以追踪普通男女对危机和人口干预的看法是如何反应的。这项研究之所以重要，是因为它将促进社会科学对科学与政策之间的关系的理解，以及科学知识传播给公众时的文化影响。考虑到对世界人口的持续担忧以及旨在控制人口的计划受到的限制，这项研究也具有全球意义。这项研究也将有助于研究生的教育。

Brown University doctoral student, Inna Leykin, with the guidance of Dr. Daniel Jordan Smith, will investigate how scientific discourses and state policies affect public understandings of population problems as well as the culture of person and family. The research will be carried out in Russia where a sense of crisis of under-population has recently emerged. Although the country's population has been rapidly decreasing for several decades, this decline has only recently become a matter of concern to social scientists, government authorities, and the general public. The researcher plans to investigate why it is that this long-term demographic phenomenon recently has been diagnosed as a problem that needs to be fixed, on whose authority, and how Russian citizens see the prescriptions for treatment.Based in Yekaterinburg, a large provincial city with declining population, Leykin will conduct participant observation in the demographic section of the Institute of Economics of the Russian Academy of Science. She plans to document how the problem is framed, how interventions are designed, and how they are received in the population. She will conduct interviews with the public officials implementing population policies and with ordinary citizens affected by the new policies, to trace how ordinary men and women respond to perceptions of crises and population interventions. The research is important because it will advance social scientific understanding of the relationship between science and policy, as well as the cultural effects when scientific knowledge is transmitted to the public. The research also has worldwide significance given ongoing concerns about the world's population and the constraints placed on programs designed to control it. The research also will contribute to the education of a graduate student.