Natalia Savelyeva
Natalia Savelyeva is a sociologist and a researcher with Public Sociology Laboratory. She graduated from the Moscow State University in 2007 and subsequently received two Master's degrees from the French University College in Moscow and the European University at St. Petersburg. Natalia holds a PhD in Social Sciences from the Institute of Sociology, Russian Academy of Science. She worked as a post-doctoral researcher at the University Wisconsin-Madison in 2019-2020 and the University of Indiana, Bloomington, in 2020-2021.
Natalia's research focuses on several topics: time and labor; protest movements in Russia and Ukraine; war conflicts in the post-Soviet space. Her articles have been published in a number of academic journals, such as Osteuropa and the International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society, and Russian and international media. She is also a co-author of the collective monograph Politics of Apoliticals (2015, in Russian). Natalia took part in PS Lab projects on political mobilizations in Russia and Ukraine and the war in the Donbas region. Among her fields of expertise are labor studies, organizational and management studies, transformations of capitalism, time and temporality, social movement studies, war studies, and biographical and narrative approaches in social science.
Selected Publications
Savelyeva, N. (2019). Autonom gestartet, gesteuert geendet, Von Russland unterstützte bewaffnete Gruppen im Donbass. Osteuropa, 3-4, 133-147.
Zhuravlev, O., Savelyeva, N., Erpyleva, S. (2019). The cultural pragmatics of an event: The politicization of local activism in Russia. International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society, 30, 163-180.
Zhuravlev, O., Savelyeva, N., Erpyleva, S. (2019). The cultural pragmatics of an event: The politicization of local activism in Russia. International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society, 30, 163-180.
Articles
Savelyeva, N. (February 15, 2022). Something to believe in: Signifiers, symbols and Russia's national ideology. Open Democracy.
Savelyeva, N. (April 30, 2021). 'The future sucks': Why the work you love won't love you back. An Interview with Sarah Jaffe. Open Democracy.
Savelyeva, N. (March 13, 2020). How 'love what you do' went wrong in an 'academic sweatshop' in Siberia. Open Democracy.
Savelyeva, N. (April 30, 2021). 'The future sucks': Why the work you love won't love you back. An Interview with Sarah Jaffe. Open Democracy.
Savelyeva, N. (March 13, 2020). How 'love what you do' went wrong in an 'academic sweatshop' in Siberia. Open Democracy.
Media
Teaching Experience
Qualitative Methods in Social Science
This course covers the main methods of conducting qualitative research, such as interview, observation, experiment, content analysis, and others. Is it possible to conduct scientific research just talking to or observing people? Is an experiment in social science possible? Why do contemporary social scientists not always trust only statistics and polls? What is the difference between a qualitative sociologist and a quantitative sociologist? And the most importantly, how does one organize qualitative social research? We also consider the problems researchers usually face when organizing their fieldwork: how to find informants, how to empathize while preserving the emotional distance necessary for analysis, how to work in dangerous fields, whether it is appropriate to hide the real goals of research from participants, and so forth. The course is fieldwork oriented. The course reading list is aimed at helping students design their own research and practice particular methods. However, the main emphasis is on doing empirical research. Each student will choose a topic for his/her research and develop it during the course. Each week students are required to practice a particular method of collecting and analyzing data. Most in-class meetings will be organized around discussing individual students' empirical work. For the final written assignment, the student will write a short research paper based on the empirical data they collected.
Writing, Thinking, Analysis, Interpretation
This course aims at introducing undergraduate students to various types of writing, such as creative and academic writing and teaches students how to engage with texts through analysis and interpretation. It covers the principles of traditional rhetoric, the structure of academic argument, and new writing models designed to develop one's creativity. The course helps students acquire and begin to develop the writing and thinking skills essential in both professional and everyday life. In addition, WTAI aims at familiarizing students with different types of academic and creative discourses and genres: philosophical essays, scientific articles, prose, poetry, criticism, etc.
Why Do We Believe?
This course familiarizes students with how different disciplines approach the question of why people become committed to particular religious, political, and social ideas and beliefs.
In Search for Time
This course discusses how social scientists study the feeling of time and different temporalities. This course is interdisciplinary, incorporating literature from sociology, anthropology, history, philosophy, and literary studies.
