Project Design Session — 2020

Faculty candidates from 15 countries. 12–16 March.

SAS research program relies on interdisciplinary research teams integrated into global academic networks; these teams replace traditional disciplinary departments and ensure intensive communication among faculty members within and across disciplines.

Research teams are formed through an innovative faculty search procedure thereby finalists get together in Tyumen for a project design session where they self-organize into interdisciplinary teams and propose research projects. Core members of the best project teams receive full-time faculty positions at SAS.

This year SAS is particularly interested in the following research directions, within which more concrete team projects will be designed:

• The challenges posed by AI decision-making, machine creativity and technological objects becoming social subjects.
• Ethical and societal implications of genome technologies and neuroscience, such as genetic engineering, resurrection of extinct species, and direct manipulation of cognition and emotion in the brain, including in new media.
• Multilevel evolution and the possibilities and limitations of applying evolutionary theory and ‘the logic of chance’ to social, economic, and cultural structures in their historical development.
• Arctic cities in the changing environment, ‘glocalization’ of the impact of environmental and technological changes on the economy, everyday urban experience, culture and society.
• Implications of changing economic dominance of Global South vs. Global North, East vs. West, etc. for the economic, technological, social and national divides in the multipolar world. The possibilities of the creation of communities across these divides, including by means of storytelling and visual media.

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