School of Asian Studies

Publications

• Book

  Son Z.

  The Russian Koreans in the 1920s and 1930s. An Ethnic Community in the Face of Soviet Power

  This book offers the first comprehensive exploration of the history of Soviet Koreans (1920s-1930s), focusing into their experiences in the USSR. It examines the impact of Stalin's foreign and domestic policies on
  Soviet Koreans, their role in the socio-economic development of the Far East, and their contributions to the Red Army, as well as the cultural and educational aspects of their lives. Key themes include the political repression of Soviet Koreans during Stalin’s era and their subsequent rehabilitation in the Russian Federation.

  
  

  Brill, 2025.

• Article

  Ulgen H.

  Peer networks as epistemic infrastructure: Rethinking social support among Turkish students in Russian-medium higher education

  This study reports a secondary analysis of phenomenologically informed, semistructured interviews with 15 Turkish undergraduate and graduate students at three universities in Moscow and examines how peer networks function beyond emotional buffering to support academic engagement and institutional navigation in Russian–medium higher education. Drawing on social support theory, communities of practice, and community cultural wealth perspectives, reflexive thematic analysis was used to develop three themes: emotional buffering, through which peer networks provided psychological protection and cultural continuity; epistemic infrastructure, through which peers mediated access to disciplinary knowledge, institutional expectations, and academic survival strategies; and cumulative institutional literacy, through which students moved from reactive coping to proactive navigation and transmitted navigational capital across cohorts. The findings extend the dominant social support literature by developing the concept of epistemic infrastructure—peer networks in linguistically demanding academic environments operating not only as psychological buffers but also as structured channels through which institutional knowledge is generated, distributed, and transmitted across student cohorts.

  Journal of International Students. 2026. Vol. 16. No. 17. P. 283-312.

• Book chapter

  Singh A.

  The Partition of 1947 and the Phenomenology of Violence

  Phenomenology as a method allows the person to understand the historical facts along with an emotive structure. History as a fact does not hold meaning of it can’t be related to the time period which it describes. Human emotion feelings are on of the best guides for a comprehensive structure to understand the events as important as the partition of India in 1947. It was not just political or geographical movement to be scaled it was a human tragedy which can’t be completely captured by the facts, it needs essence of the entire event to be understood in terms of violence and displacement and the feelings associated with all these factors. The political, cultural shift that was witnessed in the 20th century in India was a water shed event as it led to the creation of the two separate trends of cultural and sociological interpretations which viewed the event in terms of its effects and causes. The paper tries to view the historical event from the prism of phenomenology and locate all variables from the phenomenological perspective to have better grasp of the facts and the emotions. 

  In bk.: Война и мир: вооруженные конфликты в Южной Азии и пути их разрешения. M.: 2026. P. 180-196.

• Working paper

  Ustyuzhanin V., Zinkina J. V., Korotayev A.

  Extended Family Structures Exert a Causal Influence on Fertility

  Research of the impact of kin alloparenting on reproduction mainly focuses on mother’s parents and parents-in-law. The impact on fertility of extended families and the alloparental help with childcare they can provide has received much less attention. Moreover, there is an important lacuna in the existing studies of this problem, as it is mostly approached through correlational studies, while the presence of a causal link remains unclear. Using an instrumental variables approach, we demonstrate that prevalence of extended family structures exert a causal influence on fertility. A one standard-deviation increase in prevalence of extended families is associated with approximately 1.07 additional children per woman. These results highlight that family structure is not only statistically significant but also demographically consequential in shaping fertility outcomes.

  SocArXiv. Soc. SocArXiv, 2025