Inclusive trends of urban development: Temporalspatial social practices

The article presents the results of a review of the data of Russian and international research of social-urban development as presented at the scientific events in the Saratov region. In contemporary urbanism, there is a number of trends: temporal, of universal design, and social-cultural. The Russian urban development follows agglomeration trends that are increasingly evident in the processes of settlement, which means active development of suburban areas, changes in their landscape characteristics, cultural spaces, and mobility of citizens. The covid-19 pandemic had a complex impact on the social-urban features of cities in Russia and the world by transforming the structure and functionality of many urban locations, creating conditions for the emergence of a post-coronavirus city. The empirical data show that such a city is the most socially sensitive to negative and positive aspects of social life and to manifestations of inclusive practices that unite people. Under the low, fragmented accessibility of social, cultural and other infrastructure of cities that are designed for healthy people, there is a synchronization of urban infrastructure elements in the context of inclusion due to the social demand for a coronavirus transformation of the architectural and urban environment in terms of social distancing. Based on the research data from different regions of Russia, the authors identify priority directions of the inclusive development of social urbanism: models of the inclusive culture of urban communities; monitoring of the city accessible environment for citizens of different age and mobility (in particular, with the tracing and walk along approaches); model of participatory urban planning and social expertise of the inclusiveness of the urban space; educational model of professional training in the field of social urbanism and universal design.

Moral education of students in the contemporary society

With the advancement of the contemporary society to the stage of global digitalization, the issues of personality education, its means and methods are becoming increasingly important. The strategy of Russias scientific-technological development presupposes, among other things, the formation of certain ideological and axiological priorities, in accordance with which the value characteristics of the information society change and reproduce. Moral education is a purposeful development of the personal moral culture: moral activity, system of values, moral feelings and behavior that corresponds to the ideals and principles of humanistic morality. Moral activity as an important personal quality in the information society presupposes an internal need for continuous moral improvement, a desire to creatively set and solve new, increasingly complex tasks of the technological development. The development of such moral activity of the student also means his ability to choose actions on the basis of the contemporary trends of the dynamic social development, and to choose actions that are the most appropriate for a specific situation. The organization of moral education at the university consists of two main interrelated directions: moral education and teaching students the skills of moral behavior. Complex activities of the university serve not only as a means of moral education but also as its condition, which requires their inclusion in the educational process and purposeful organization. The efficiency of moral education at the university depends on the system of influence on students, and its main components are as follows: ethical education and teaching ethical disciplines; development of sustainable traditions of corporate culture (mission of the university, system of life values, ethical codes of students and teachers, etc.); ethical orientation of general-theoretical and professional disciplines; moral-educational components in the organization of the educational process; non-learning activities with students, labor education, volunteer activities, etc.

Domestic sexual child abuse: Social and social-cultural aspects

The ratification of the Lanzarote Convention by Russia in 2013 entails several issues that cannot be resolved without the help of social-humanitarian sciences. Information from sociology, psychology, and jurisprudence has been used to create a concept for the empirical study of the domestic violence against children - to improve the implementation of the Convention in Russia. The concept considers two aspects of the problem - social and social-cultural. The article presents the Russian experience of how the provisions of the Council of Europe Convention on the Protection of Children against Sexual Exploitation and Sexual Abuse are implemented. The authors analyze statistical data on the number of families in which a sexually abused child is brought up; the number of abortions and childbirths by minors; the number of minors in educational colonies; the work of the childrens helpline; the number of mediation services; the number of social service organizations for families and children; the number of professionals working with children in programs aimed at preventing and protecting children from sexual exploitation and abuse; the number of organizations providing psychological-pedagogical and medical-social assistance; the number of specialized multifunctional centers providing assistance to families and child victims of sexual abuse; the number of specialized green rooms for investigating crimes related to minors; the number of specialists accompanying minors who have come into conflict with the law at all stages of the investigation and court proceedings; the number of professionals trained under the Child Sexual Violence Protection Program and now assisting families and child victims of violence. The article will be useful for readers who study the implementation of the Lanzarote Convention and the issues of child sexual abuse and domestic violence.

Student assessments of the higher education (on the example of the monitoring survey of the MPEI graduates)

The authors make an attempt of solving the task of providing the students with a possibility to assess the quality of the organization and content of the higher education. The authors consider the Russian and Western practices of engaging students in such assessing activities as one of their main actors. The article identifies the most common forms of student participation in ensuring the quality of education, some of its problem areas and unused resources. Thus, the basic form of student participation in evaluation and control activities in the university is to fill out various questionnaires in order to express their assessments and opinions about the courses taken during the training period. The authors considered some relevant practices of foreign and Russian universities, in particular, the experience of the RUDN University, North-Eastern Federal University, Institute of Quality Student Commissioners of the Kemerovo branch of the RSTEU, and the Center for Applied Sociological Research of the MPEI. The article presents the results of the sociological study of opinions and assessments of the MPEI graduates in technical and social-humanitarian areas, which was conducted in 2017-2019 on the issues of basic and professional training. The monitoring study revealed a number of factors that affect the quality of practical training at the university, which allowed the authors to identify the key problems of marketing educational services by the contemporary university and to show the need to study the issues of self-realization of graduates, their demand in the labor market, and to search for new criteria for assessing the quality of higher education. The authors believe that we need a new ideology of quality management in the higher education, and propose some conditions and measures that would ensure the high quality of the higher education in Russia.

New villagers: motives and factors for moving from urban to rural areas

In developed countries, along with urbanization, the opposite process - ruralization or deurbanization - is becoming increasingly noticeable. Ruralization is not only the movement of townspeople to the countryside, but also the development of villages and the increasing importance of rural areas as a place to live and work. Townspeople make the decision to move by comparing the advantages and disadvantages of living in urban and rural areas, and non-economic motives (the desire to get closer to nature, to find ones roots, to live in silence, without haste, to eat natural products, etc.) play an important role in this decision. Among economic motives, the difference in the cost of urban and rural real estate and of life in general is the most important motive, i.e., families, especially young and large, can improve their living conditions by moving to the countryside. The study, the results of which are presented in the article, aimed at identifying those groups of townspeople that tend to resettlement, their motives, and factors pushing people to leave cities and facilitating/hindering resettlement to rural areas. The research is based on the study of special literature on the topic and on the data of the survey of resettled townspeople and experts in ruralization. Unlike most publications on ruralization, the author focuses on the positive aspects of the resettlement of townspeople to the countryside and insists on the removal of administrative barriers that prevent ruralization, because the resettlement of townspeople to the countryside does not have a negative impact on the city and is compensated by the influx of people from the countryside, who want to get education or a new profession.

Complex concepts with varying connotations: In search for conceptual definitions

One of the fundamental challenges for sociology is the interpretation of its key terms, which is determined by the fact that many words of everyday language and scientific discourse are the same despite implying a much higher level of generalization as sociological categories. Certainly, such challenges are more typical for the empirical research - when sociologists turn their theoretical concepts into sets of empirical indicators which have to be clear enough for the respondent to understand and answer the questionnaire and for the sociologist to interpret these answers correctly. Nevertheless, the lack of generally recognized conceptual definitions is no less important, because the general picture of social reality is necessarily made of them (the society is described as either fair, consisting of trustworthy institutions that provide opportunities for being happy, or in the opposite statements). The article presents a possible reconstruction of the strategy that sociologists use in the search for conceptual definitions for such complex concepts with varying connotations as love, happiness, trust and justice. This strategy consists of two steps: focus on the macro-sociological dimension of the phenomena under study as determining its various manifestations and everyday interpretations (the key step in the study of love and happiness); and identification of objective and subjective indicators of the phenomenon under study (the key step in the study of trust and justice). For instance, in the study of love and happiness, there is the obvious micro-sociological perspective that implies personal responsibility for being happy and loved, and the hidden macro-sociological perspective that implies social standards for identifying and achieving love and happiness; trust is defined as a source of social order, cooperation, institutional, organizational and everyday interactions, which reduces the level of uncertainty; in the searches for the conceptual definition of justice, there are two main approaches - the first approach considers justice as one of many grounds for developing some theoretical model; the second approach reconstructs justice either as an ideal political-philosophical model of social order or as a means of the comparative analysis of its practical implementations.

The dynamics of video preferences of the Russian youth (on the example of YouTube)

Today the Internet has become an integral part of the everyday life of the younger generation, and the YouTube video hosting is one of the most visited sites among Russians aged 18 to 34. Therefore, the analysis of content, structure, and dynamics of video preferences is an important area of sociological analysis of the Russian youths interests on YouTube. The research aims at identification and description of the Russian youths interests on the basis of the analysis of their video preferences on SHAPE \* MERGEFORMAT YouTube. The authors conducted content analysis of Googles annual reports on the most popular videos on YouTube in Russia, of the content of these videos and their comments, and the analysis of quantitative indicators (likes, dislikes and views). 26 Muscovites were questioned in the format of the semi-structured interview; and two online surveys (in 2019 and 2020) were conducted, in which 340 respondents participated. The authors identified three groups of factors to analyze the dynamics of video preferences: micro-social (social-psychological, status-role and needs factors); macro-social (institutional - social, political, economic, cultural - and environmental); random. The analysis of all types of research data on the most popular video clips allowed to describe the dynamics of the youths video preferences in 2008- 2020, to show the relationship of social factors with the dynamics of the youths YouTube preferences, and that these video preferences are largely determined by individual characteristics, because the significant events in the Russian social-cultural space have little influence on the youths video preferences.

Three questions to start the sociological study of heroism

Despite the understandable and predictable lack of sociological interest in the issues related to heroism, the search for clear and unambiguous conceptual and empirical definitions of the hero in the contemporary society seems to be a relevant sociological task, especially under the current pandemic which made the criteria of heroism interesting for the wider public. The authors briefly outline the main aspects of the traditional scientific interpretations of heroism as presented in the social-cultural narratives worldwide, and proceed to the issues that constitute the field of the sociological studies on heroism. The first research question is not so much a single definition of the hero as types of heroes based on social representations of when and how heroes reveal themselves in decisions and actions. The authors rely on the traditional typologies of heroes usually based on the psychological aspects of heroic thinking and behavior to suggest a sociologically relevant typology based on both literature and the Russian public opinion polls. This typology implies answers to the questions of why the society needs heroes and what makes someone a hero in the eyes of the society, and allows to better understand and to more precisely define the false/pseudo/antiheroism. The second research question is about the sources of images and understanding of heroism, which focuses on the mass media and especially cinemas potential to represent certain social practices as heroic and to construct heroic images. The third research question is about the possibilities of the empirical sociological study of the types of heroes and their representation in the media (cinema). The authors argue that sociology should use its own methods (in a combination with techniques for studying the audiences perception of movies) - content analysis and surveys, especially the unfinished sentences technique, and provide some examples of how this can be done, for instance, to compare the social representations of a real hero and a movie hero among different age groups and generations. The authors conclude with mentioning a new issue associated with heroism, which became evident under the pandemic - changes in the social representations of heroism determined by heroization of healthcare workers due to their selfless fight against the coronavirus epidemic.

Lifestyle diseases: Health in the contemporary city

The article presents an overview of studies of the factors that affect health in the contemporary city. The increase in the urban population makes it necessary to analyze factors (environmental, social, etc.) and features of the urban structure in terms of their impact on the quality and standards of living. However, assessments of the city in the study of healthy lifestyle are contradictory. On the one hand, researchers emphasize the availability of medical care, effective fight against infectious diseases, and numerous attempts to transform the visual urban space. On the other hand, researchers stress the spatial inequality of the urban structure (for example, in access to health care), the spread of noncommunicable and lifestyle diseases in cities, the destruction of social ties and the problem of loneliness. Therefore, it is necessary to systematize the current research, identify the main risks of urban lifestyle, and discuss the role of social sciences in such interdisciplinary studies. The proposed typology of health research in the contemporary city is based on Yu.P. Lisitsyns ratio of factors that determine the level of health. Although many studies claim an integrated approach, the analysis showed that most of them present one of three approaches: the study of sanitary-hygienic features of the urban space (or its medical aspects); the study of ecology and architecture of the urban space; the study of social-psychological features of the urban lifestyle. The systematization of the main risks of the urban lifestyle allowed the author to identify the priority areas of its study. Thus, based on the features of the covid-19 pandemic in cities, the author argues that there is a need for more active participation of sociologists in the discussion of both infectious and non-communicable diseases, which should focus on social factors of their spread, course, prevention and control.

Russian students about learning under the covid-19 pandemic: Resources, opportunities and assessment of the distance learning

The covid-19 pandemic has made the whole world face specific challenges that required urgent decisions on how to organize the work of social institutions, including education, in this new reality. Since March 2020, national education systems all over the world have been adapting their activities to the quarantine measures and have been switching to distance learning. In varying degrees, these changes affected all levels of education - from preschool to higher and postgraduate education. However, the tasks to be solved differed by the level of education. The article presents the results of the comparative analysis of the activities of the Russian higher-educational institutions based on their students estimates - during the forced distance learning in the spring of 2020 and during the planned switch to such a format in the fall of 2020. The article is based on the surveys of the Russian students conducted in June 2020 (N=31423) and February 2021 (N=32358). The study was conducted to test the hypotheses that negative estimates of distance learning and rejection of such a format by many students in the spring of 2020 changed in the fall of 2020. The results of two surveys show that Russian universities have passed through the stage of digital transformation which affected both the resources for organizing the educational process and the competences of the teaching staff. The experience of work in the difficult and unpredictable conditions of the pandemic changed the public opinion from the negative perception of distance learning to understanding and accepting its positive features for the education system and its actors. The introduction of digital technologies is an objective and inevitable process in the development of the educational sphere and the country.