Public Sociology Laboratory (PS Lab) is an autonomous research group focusing on politics and society in Russia and post-Soviet regions from a comparative perspective.
Public Sociology Laboratory was founded in 2011.
эъAt that time, and occasioned by the mass protests in Russia in December 2011, the founders of PS Lab began their research on protests and social movements in Russia, which subsequently expanded to include other post-Soviet regions. But PS Lab has a backstory too. Some of its members first met each other in 2007 as part of the OD Group—a student movement fighting for the transformation of education according to international standards in the Department of Sociology, Moscow State University.
The main areas of research• Social movements, wars, revolutions, and protests
• Political reasoning and political consciousness of individuals and social groups
• Labor under neoliberal capitalism
• The political economy of authoritarian regimes
Since this beginning, PS Lab members have collaborated on multiple collective research projects and the Laboratory has come to include more members. PS Lab researchers have defended candidate (kandidat) and Ph.D. degrees in the social and political sciences and are currently working on a number of collective and individual projects on topics such as: civic politics, media, state, and labor.