Current Research Projects
Michael Buroway
"The Great Involution: Russia's Descent Into The Market"
Michael Burawoy is undertaking an "ethnography of decline" -- the ethnography of Russia's
embrace and then retreat from the market, of Russia's suspension between a hypermodern
integration into the world economy and a massive premodern regression to a primitive
economy based on barter, subsistence, and petty commodity production. Over the last decade
his ethnographies have shifted from studies of the workplace to the remarkable patterns of
barter relations (with the proliferation of intemediaries, known as the mafia, a form of
shadow state) on the one side and the increasing centrality of the household economy (and
with it the centrality of women and the marginalization of men) on the other. He is trying
to study everyday responses to a human experiment that, in the final analysis, shows every
sign as being as catastrophic and horrific as Stalinism, a form of primitive
disaccumulation or what he calls economic and social involution.
Martín Sánchez-Jankowski
"Inter-Ethnic Violence in Inner City Schools"
The research project is a two year study of five schools, four that have
experienced high
rates of inter-ethnic violence in the past two years and one that has not. The objective
of the project is to: 1) understand the conditions that precipitate and maintain this type
of violence; 2) identify how violence has physically and psychologically affected those who
have experienced it; and 3) assess the public health and law enforcement policy approaches
for controlling it.
