Inna Leykin

The Open University of Israel | openu · Department of Sociology, Political Science and Communication

In political and social scientific discourses, the link between right-wing political orientation and anti-immigrant sentiment is often presented as a universal social fact. Based on a systematic examination of the association between left-right political orientation and attitudes towards migrants, the article demonstrates a clear inconsistency in t...

We explore obstetrician-gynecologists’ (ob-gyns’) shifting involvement in late Soviet and post-Soviet reproductive politics and track broader political-economic dynamics of the profession’s ambivalent relations with state demographic discourses. Soviet ob-gyns largely distanced themselves from explicitly pronatalist agendas. Post-soviet national po...

This article examines the complex relations between two social processes-standardisation and quantification in measuring migration. We explore how international migrant populations in the European territories of the former USSR, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia have been defined, counted and presented in European population statistics. Our analysis le...

This article investigates post-Soviet practices of amateur genealogy in relation to the politics of memory in Russia. Based on long-term ethnographic research into a popular genealogy club in a large provincial city, it explores genealogists' inter-pretive practices through which flat and unified historical narratives about the Soviet past, and esp...

The article explores a series of professional development seminars for state bureaucrats in the context of the moral panic over Russia's ‘demographic crisis’. It follows the vernacularization of social knowledge for state bureaucrats – a central practice that marks these pedagogical engagements. The article explores this practice's potentialities a...

Using the Baltic states as an empirical example of a wider social problem of categorization and naming, this article explores the statistical categories of ‘international migrant/foreign-born’ population used in three major cross-national data sources (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), Eurostat and The World Bank Indica...

The discourse on the demographic crisis in contemporary Russia resonates with a neoliberal political project that attempts to govern populations through the market logic of optimization, responsibilization, and efficacy. Yet, as this article argues, the basic categories of the discourse, although evocative of a new neoliberal rationality, were in f...

Russia has been experiencing a unique population crisis. With total fertility rates ranging between 1.2 and 1.4 over the last two decades (well below the replacement level of 2.1) and a rapidly aging population, the country’s birthrates resemble demographic trends of other (both Eastern and Western) European countries. Unlike other European countri...

The article examines how people in post-Soviet Russia learn to interpret Soviet political genealogies as implicated in their own family histories. Based on long-term fieldwork in a large provincial city in Russia, it focuses on a particular form of amateur genealogy called Rodologia (rodstvo = kinship). Informed by a burgeoning self-help culture, R...

This paper explores the phenomenology of racism using the Israeli situation as a case study to examine if, when and how the concept of 'racism' is employed in local media discourse on policy towards Palestinian citizens. Our central argument is that racism, as a signifier of policy, can be located in the dialectic between denial and affirmation of...