Sociology World Congress in Armenia

The 39th World Congress of the International Institute of Sociology (IIS) will take place at Yerevan State University (YSU), Armenia, 11–14 June 2009. The theme of the Congress is: “Sociology at the Crossroads”.

IIS Word Congresses

The IIS has a longstanding tradition of promoting discussions on the most crucial theoretical issues of the day and on the practical use of social scientific knowledge. The Institute was created in Paris in 1893 by René Worms. Among its members and associates it has accounted several prominent scholars such as: Franz Boas, Roger Bastide, Lujo Brentano, Theodor Geiger, Gustave Le Bon, Karl Mannheim, William F. Ogburn, Pitirim Sorokin, Georg Simmel, Werner Sombart, Ludwig Stein, Gabriel Tarde, Richard Thurnwald, Ferdinand Toennies, Thorstein Veblen, Lester F. Ward, Sidney Webb, Max Weber, Leopold von Wiese, and Florian Znaniecki.

In recent times, the IIS has held a World Congress every 2 years and its principal publication has consisted of the Annals which stem out from each Congress - the first issue of the Annals was published in 1895. The more recent IIS World Congresses were held in Budapest (2008), Stockholm (2005), Beijing (2004), Krakow (2001), Tel Aviv (1999), Köln (1997), Trieste (1995), Paris (1993), Kobe (1991) and Rome (1989).

The 5 most recent World Congresses have highlighted dilemmas of human existence and societal institutions in the contemporary world. They have examined problems of social existence amidst processes of globalization, cooperation and violent conflict. They have been conducted in the spirit which guided the formation of the IIS, namely that of an engagement and encounter between a variety of theoretical positions among members of an international community of scholars.
The Yerevan Congress

The 39th World Congress will reaffirm that spirit. It will have 3 broad focuses, namely questions concerning the way Sociology can arrive at a reformulated understanding of dilemmas of humanity in the contemporary era, including the nature of war and violence, of political order and states and state-like entities, of religious and cultural encounters, of processes of collective memories, traumas and reconciliations, and of shifting conceptions of law, legal regulation, human rights and international order.

The Congress will also highlight cutting-edge theoretical advances in Sociology and neighboring disciplines as well as teaching and curricular developments of Sociology and Social Science in general in universities in the future.

The Congress is hosted by Yerevan State University (YSU) and organized by Lyudmila Haroutiunian, Dean of Sociology, YSU and Björn Wittrock, President of the IIS. Other organizers include:
Craig Calhoun, New York University (NYU), and President, Social Science Research Council (SSRC), New York
Yehuda Elkana, Central European University (CEU)
Peter Hedström, Nuffield College, Oxford and Singapore Management University (SMU), Secretary-General, IIS, and President, European Academy of Sociology
Hans Joas, Max-Weber-Kolleg, University of Erfurt, University of Chicago, and Vice-President, International Sociological Association
Shalini Randeria, University of Zürich and President, European Association of Social Anthropologists

According to IIS, the Institute is a community of scholars that plays a complementary rather than a competitive role relative to its larger sister institution, the International Sociological Association (ISA). The IIS itself is a member of ISA and hopes that there will be a strong presence of the ISA and of its Research Committees in Yerevan.

The Congress is jointly sponsored by YSU and the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study (SCAS). Professor Björn Wittrock, President of the IIS is also the Principal of SCAS. The Swedish Collegium hosts the IIS Secretariat during Professor Wittrock's presidency (2005-2009).

This will undoubtedly be a major achievement for Sociology and related disciplines in Armenia, for YSU, in general, and for Professor Lyudmila Haroutiunian and her colleagues, in particular. Sociology was not recognized as a scientific discipline under Soviet rule and was introduced in the academia as recently as 15 years ago.

For further information, please click here.
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Picture: Guernica, Picasso, 1937.
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Education Budget 09: Towards Collapse?

Arka news agency reports that according to Mr. Radik Martirosian, President of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS), the current attitude [of the authorities] to Armenian science is intolerable as it will lead to collapse.

“A strong army and economy are necessary for a powerful country. To have a strong economy, a country needs a science in line with modern standards,” Martirosian said during parliamentary hearings.

Referring to drastic cuts in government’s 2009 budget on science, he said the situation will get even worse in the coming 3 years. According to the NAS President, 8.3 billion AMD will be allocated to science in 2009, which is 0.85 percent of the total state budget. This compares to 0.9 percent of the total budget for 2008 or 6.8 billion AMD [so why is it considered a cut?].

Martirosian said Armenia’s neighbors spend more on science than Armenia, adding that the average monthly salary for a NAS researcher is 55,000 AMD (180 USD) and the government spends on average 1 million AMD (3,275 USD) per researcher per year. Out of this sum, 800,000 AMD is allocated to salary and social charges, and only 200,000 AMD is spent on research activities. In comparison, Russia’s average annual expenditure per scientist stands at 16,000 USD.

The NAS President said the current budget is not enough to guarantee the country’s scientific progress.

Minister of Education and Science Mr. Spartak Seyranian has, however, defended the state budget on several occasions. Most notably, at Yerevan State University of Pedagogy that has a rather docile staff – probably selected exactly for that reason – the Minister explained that although the new budget “does not solve all our problems, it has struck a good balance between our resources and desires.” He claimed that the overall education and science expenditures reached 2.53 percent of the state budget in 2006, 2.84 in 2007, 2.94 in 2008, and will rise to 3.03 percent in 2009.

There are at least 3 issues that need to be considered:
1.
The budget for primary, secondary, vocational, and higher education as well as scientific research are usually put together and stated as one by the Ministry. It is therefore difficult to ascertain how different sub-sectors are affected by changes in the education budget. How much the increase from 2.94 to 3.03 percent of the state budget will affect the higher education? Probably, nil.

Mr. Seyranian himself has acknowledged that the next year’s projected increase will mainly benefit primary and secondary school teachers, in terms of salary hikes, and that he “unfortunately, cannot say the same for university instructors and researcher” who remain dramatically underpaid.
2.
The total budget allocated to education, even at 3 percent of the state budget, is extremely low for a country that seeks to build a knowledge-driven economy. At 3%, it is possible to maintain the system as it is which, in the case of Armenia, is not exactly a desirable situation (underpaid staff, under-equipped schools, rundown buildings, etc.).

In Israel, for instance, the budget for higher education alone stands at 2 percent of the state budget whereas in Korea it stands at 2.5 percent (total education accounts for 19.4 percent). Taiwan, another country that seems moving towards a knowledge-driven economy, prioritizes education, science and culture (put together) with 18.7 percent of the state budget. In Malaysia, despite an approximately 6 percent of the state budget for higher education, the government has been severely criticized by the proponents of a faster and broader ICT development.

Going from 2.94 to 3.03 percent of the state budget for the county’s whole education and science infrastructure – a Lilliputian step – is supposed to impress who?
3.
It is also important to see what are behind these figures; what is exactly being funded. In Armenia’s case, where private sources of funding of education and research are rather negligible (which is not the case in countries indicated above), the sum representing 3% of the state budget can hardly cover the operating expenses.

The higher education budget, for instance, barely covers student scholarships and faculty salaries. There is nothing left for development expenses and this, as Mr. Radik Martirosian puts it, will certainly lead to collapse.

Mr. Spartak Seyranian and the government to which he belongs may have indeed struck a “good balance between resources and desires”; but this balance has not been reached thanks to increased resources but due to their extremely limited desires and ambitions for this country.
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Picture: Mr. Radik Martirosian, President of the National Academy of Sciences of Armenia.
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The Rise & Fall of Science Towns

“The Future Ruins of the Nuclear Age” is the title of an extensive, comprehensive and interesting account of Russia’s science towns by Masha Gessen. She is a Moscow-based journalist and the author of “Dead Again: The Russian Intelligentsia After Communism”. She has posted the article on her Commandrine’s Weblog.

In pursuit of superpower status, the Soviet Union built 60 science towns but, when it collapsed in 1990, the funding for these cities ended and the human tragedy began. I have already discussed the fate of one – and probably the best known – of these cities, Dubna where Russia has tried in recent times to revive its R&D capacity and promote nanotechnology.

Ms. Gessen writes:

In the postwar drive to harness the atom, the Soviet government built little towns charged with various scientific tasks. About 60 of these towns were created between the late 1940s and early 1980s. Some of them, towns where new weapons were designed, were not even on the map. Other towns worked on what the Soviets called “the peaceful atom” and were considered “open,” which meant that access to them was highly restricted for foreigners and that the residents themselves were closely monitored by the secret police.

In exchange for their isolation - these towns were generally situated at least a couple of hours outside major cities - the researchers enjoyed a standard of living significantly higher than elsewhere in the Soviet Union. The towns, usually built in beautiful wooded areas, boasted better town planning - well, any town planning was better than the haphazard warehousing of the citizenry that went on elsewhere - higher salaries, and, paradoxically, a sort of cloistered freedom. The scientists in some of the open towns were allowed to organize performances of singers or exhibits of artists considered too ideologically unreliable for a wider audience. For the intelligentsia living outside, science towns held the allure of romantic impossibility. When I was 8, my translator grandmother married a nuclear physicist living in Dubna, one of the science towns - and it seemed my family’s entire Moscow social circle was struck by the glamour of it.

The exchange of talent for the good life made for an extraordinarily productive relationship between the state and the scientists. The science towns helped ensure the Soviet Union’s standing as a military and intellectual superpower, and the state paid them back by ensuring their continued comfort.

The top graduates of the country’s famous math and science high schools and high- pressure technical colleges were assigned to the science towns, where they received good pay and, usually, an apartment - while their peers had to make do with dorm rooms or communal flats. They were the chosen people.

In 1990 science funding suddenly dropped about 90 percent. With the country on the brink of collapse, international prestige finally had to take a back seat to economic emergencies. Construction in the science towns froze and the trickle of young science graduates dried up. By 1993, many institutes could not afford to keep their electricity turned on, and the life in most labs had ground to a halt. While the economic disaster of the early ’90s hit the entire country, the science towns were arguably in the worst position to adjust. Unlike military-factory towns, which also lost their funding overnight, the science towns had no industry to convert to civilian production. Unlike their colleagues living in other cities, the scientists in science towns could not switch to careers in finance or the service industries: most of them lived hours away from anything that wasn’t a research institute, and they had no money to move.

While a small scientific lobby is pushing a hopeless bill in the Russian parliament to secure full federal funding for at least a dozen of the towns, salaries and pensions in some science towns are held up for months, even more than a year at a time. When the wages are paid, they generally range between about 70 USD and 200 USD a month. The head of one nuclear institute at the heart of a science town shot himself last year - his colleagues are convinced it was over the lack of funding. For a few years, starting around 1992, various Western foundations, led by American financier-philanthropist George Soros’s organization, gave out small grants to Russian exact scientists. Now most of that funding has dried up: Soros, for one, has said he will no longer single-handedly attempt to save Russian science if the Russian government plans to do nothing to help.

Many scientists find occasional teaching gigs in the West: if they are frugal during their semester of lecturing in some Midwestern town, they can save enough money to finance the following year at home. Some get financial infusions from more fortunate relatives living elsewhere. Many find ways to procure cheaper produce, even to live off the land with tiny plots they stake out outside the towns.

But even if each individual survival can be explained separately, the mechanism of the towns’ collective endurance remains largely a mystery. Without the infusions of money and people, the towns and their populations are aging steadily, slowing down, and losing their old buzz, but the buildings are not crumbling and the residents are not deserting. In fact, the “brain drain” that has been the bugbear of post-Soviet science and technology, whose best and brightest are lured to the West, has barely affected the science towns. A recent survey of science towns’ residents conducted by the Russian Labor Institute found that most young people would like to stay in the towns and in the sciences. Perhaps they are incurable romantics.

Or perhaps, being the best and the brightest among the best and the brightest, they know something we don’t; perhaps they are right in believing that they are in possession of something so unique and precious that they should spend the rest of their lives propping up - and touching up - these 60 giant monuments to the power of science, the future ruins of the Nuclear Age.

Protvino (site in Russian), population 40,000, is one of the youngest science towns. The Institute for High Energy Physics (site in Russian) was founded in 1963 and its accelerator completed in 1967, with the first experiments run in 1968. The town is built in a moderately impressive pine forest about 100 kilometers outside Moscow, where the small Protva River meets the larger Oka. The problem is, it is haunted….

To read the article in full, please click here.
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5 Percent Digitalized

According to Panorama.am, 800 manuscripts of Matenadaran’s collection have already been digitalized. Mr. Gourgen Gasparian, the Associate Director of Matenadaran, Armenia’s State Institute of Manuscripts, said that the main objective is to protect and share Armenia's national heritage.

When these manuscripts become available on the Internet, he said, a wider audience will become knowledgeable of and have access to these cultural treasures. Moreover, according to Mr. Gasparian, scientific research can substantially ease when the original manuscripts are digitalized and catalogued.

The Institute holds more than 17,000 manuscripts from which approximately 13,000 are in Armenian and the remaining works are mainly in Arabic, Persian, Russian, Greek and Japanese. The non-Armenian works will be placed on-line as well. The Institute also possesses around 100,000 "ancient archived objects”.

Matenadaran has not announced when it plans to place the digitalized material on-line and whether the consultation of the on-line library will be free.
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