The HSE Moscow Centre for Cultural Sociology carries out theoretical and empirical investigations of culture and its paramount role within contemporary societies. Our primary interest concerns social inequalities and the various ways in which culture informs individuals’ identities, perceptions, rationales, actions, preferences, aspirations and decision-making patterns.

Social inequality is stubbornly rigid, persists in societies across the globe, and is often resistant to even the best intended interventions. Education, as one of the constitutive social institutions of modernity, provides perhaps the most potent vector to mitigate and reverse social inequalities. This informs our interest in the life course and education/career choice – the processes through which social inequalities emerge and reemerge in individual lives. By combining theoretical and empirical studies, and qualitative and quantitative methods, we seek to advance intra- and inter-disciplinary dialogue, while providing an ecosystem or the development of state-of-the-art cultural sociology and inequality studies.