Research Seminar – 30 May – Inna Leykin

Inna Leykin (Open University of Israel, MIASU visiting scholar)

‘Caring like a state:’ the politics of Russia’s population problems

Identified as the most acute problem facing the country, the ‘demographic crisis’ has been a popular and continuous topic of both mundane conversations and televised political debates in contemporary Russia. Based on a long-term ethnographic study that reconstructs political, social, and cultural processes, by which Russia’s demographic reality came to be conceived as a grave social concern, I shall use the national preoccupation with demography to understand the relations of care between the state and its citizens. I shall focus on what it means to ‘care like a state,’ and also on how these efforts to care for the population resonate with existing cultural models of care and support in contemporary Russia. By linking the distinct worlds of population experts, state and non-state actors to the subjective experiences of ordinary citizens, the talk shall examine diverse meanings of care produced by Russia’s population problem and the state pronatalist policies.