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

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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.