V. M. Bekhterev in Russian Child Science, 1900s-1920s: “Objective Psychology” / “Reflexology” as a Scientific Movement

In the early 20th century the child population became a major focus of scientific, professional and public interest. This led to the crystallization of a dynamic field of child science, encompassing developmental and educational psychology, child psychiatry and special education, school hygiene and mental testing, juvenile criminology and the anthropology of childhood. This article discusses the role played in child science by the eminent Russian neurologist and psychiatrist Vladimir Mikhailovich Bekhterev. The latter's name is associated with a distinctive program for transforming the human sciences in general and psychology in particular that he in the 1900s labelled “objective psychology” and from the 1910s renamed “reflexology.” The article examines the equivocal place that Bekhterev's “objective psychology” and “reflexology” occupied in Russian/Soviet child science in the first three decades of the 20th century. While Bekhterev's prominence in this field is beyond doubt, analysis shows that “objective psychology” and “reflexology” had much less success in mobilizing support within it than certain other movements in this arena (for example, “experimental pedagogy” in the pre-revolutionary era); it also found it difficult to compete with the variety of rival programs that arose within Soviet “pedology” during the 1920s. However, this article also demonstrates that the study of child development played a pivotal role in Bekhterev's program for the transformation of the human sciences: it was especially important to his efforts to ground in empirical phenomena and in concrete research practices a new ontology of the psychological, which, the article argues, underpinned “objective psychology”/“reflexology” as a transformative scientific movement

Lechebnaia pedagogika: The Concept and Practice of Therapy in Russian Defectology, c. 1880–1936

Therapy is not simply a domain or form of medical practice, but also a metaphor for and a performance of medicine, of its functions and status, of its distinctive mode of action upon the world. This article examines medical treatment or therapy (in Russian lechenie), as concept and practice, in what came to be known in Russia as defectology (defektologiia) – the discipline and occupation concerned with the study and care of children with developmental pathologies, disabilities and special needs. Defectology formed an impure, occupationally ambiguous, therapeutic field, which emerged between different types of expertise in the niche populated by children considered ‘difficult to cure’, ‘difficult to teach’, and ‘difficult to discipline’. The article follows the multiple genealogy of defectological therapeutics in the medical, pedagogical and juridical domains, across the late tsarist and early Soviet eras. It argues that the distinctiveness of defectological therapeutics emerged from the tensions between its biomedical, sociopedagogical and moral-juridical framings, resulting in ambiguous hybrid forms, in which medical treatment strategically interlaced with education or upbringing, on the one hand, and moral correction, on the other

Between Neo-nationalizing Russia and Brexit Britain: The Dilemmas of Russian Migrants’ Political Mobilizations

The article analyses the evolution, during the 2000s and 2010s, of civic engagement and political mobilization of post-Soviet Russian-speaking migrants living in the UK, and highlights the importance of these migrants’ inherently transnational position in-between several polities. Transformations of their mobilizations are governed by: the changing context of immigration opportunities in the UK; the technological advancements of new modes of communication; larger political shifts in both Russia and the UK; and significantly, the availability of specific opportunity structures for mobilization. The principal opportunity structures available to these migrants in the 2000s fostered their mobilization as a culturally-defined minority migrant community and encouraged them to become part of a global network of Russian “compatriots”. A new opportunity structure emerged in the early 2010s in the form of a transnational protest movement against political corruption in the Russian Federation. However, as the Russian government introduced policies effecting a growing disenfranchisement of Russians resident abroad from political developments in Russia itself, many Russians in the UK have started to look for new ways to engage. The politics of Brexit have become one new opportunity structure for them

Pamiat' o "repressirovannykh naukakh" v istorii Rossii: Sluchai pedologii

Анализируется дискуссия, развернувшаяся в постсоветские годы вокруг «вытравленной» науки педологии, некоторых современных попыток её реабилитации и частичного возрождения. Педология здесь выступает в качестве «профессионального / научного движения», характерного для конкретного исторического этапа. Случай педологии оказывается полезным для анализа науки как объекта памяти и субъекта истории в российском контексте. = The paper analyses post-Soviet debates around the ‘purged science’ of pedology and some contemporary attempts at partially ‘reviving’ some of its aspects, in the context of the problem of historical memory. The article prеsents pedology as a historically-specific ‘professional/scientific movement’. The case of pedology emerges as particularly poignant for the analysis of ‘science’ as an object of memory and subject of history in the Russian context