The urban folklore, explored through the prism of dozens of interviews, encompasses a vast layer of unwritten history — oral narratives shaped by the workings of (selective) memory — and is understood by the author as a complex of powerful expressive techniques emerging from below. In studying the mental maps of the city of Shushi through the eyes of its residents, the author examines the sense of local place, its ethnization, intertextuality, and indexed memory within the processuality of these overlapping phenomena, the workings of memory, and the construction of identities. Navigating through the ruptures of long-standing and epochal transformations of meanings and ethno-politics, the author observes the city’s quarters through various lenses: power relations and influence, (geo-)politics of memory, neighborhood, conflict, human rights, and policies of inclusion and exclusion. The study also focuses on the palimpsestic memory of ethnic confrontation in the city of Shushi/Shusha, Nagorno-Karabakh. The author proposes to examine the conceptual maps of the city through the prism of personal experiences of traumatic events in a comparative perspective from 1920 to 2020, as well as to compare the experiences of multiple episodes of violent displacement, massacres, and war through a combination of methods — mental mapping, in-depth interviews, and comparative analysis of individual biographies. Originally written in Russian, the text was later translated into Armenian and English and published in the bilingual volume Shushi: Mental Mapping (eds. Tigran Amiryan and Evia Karapetyan) in Yerevan in 2021. A second edition appeared in 2023. This marks the first publication of the original Russian-language version.

The paper presents a case study of a youth workshop on urban studies and sociocultural programming, which operated in Kaliningrad in 2019–21 as part of the program of the International Film Festival “On the Edge. West.” About 10 high school students from various schools in the city conducted field anthropological research on oral history, local identity, and current problems of the vernacular Selma district. This territory began to be developed on the northern outskirts of Kaliningrad in the second half of the 1990s. Now it is the largest post-Soviet district of the city, consisting of several residential complexes of multi-storey new buildings. Residents of the city often perceived it as the most uninteresting area of Kaliningrad because it was built very recently and did not have a rich history. However, under the guidance of the author of the article, high school students collected a wealth of material on the history of the district, assembled a collection of urban legends and vivid oral narratives about Selma, as well as mental maps created by residents. In addition, the workshop participants used methods of visual anthropology: they took ethnographic photographs of the area and collected visual artifacts such as advertisements on entrances and vernacular graffiti. After analyzing the collected materials, the young researchers wrote the book “Myths and Legends of Selma Urban District”. The publication of this unusual book about a new district of the city became an important event for Kaliningrad, was actively discussed in the local media, and also influenced community building among Selma activists. This case shows that the film festival’s program of educational and socio-cultural projects using anthropological methods can work as a tool for spatial development and community building. 

The article describes the anthropological aspect of the interdisciplinary project on urban space research, “Workshop”, organized by the Chelyabinsk House of Architects (a division of the Agency for Innovation and Investment Development of the City of Chelyabinsk). The history and general specifics of the cycle are presented: from 2020 to 2024, several dozen participants (students, young specialists, and established professionals) had the opportunity to engage in pre-project research and the development of urban planning projects for real territories in Chelyabinsk. Under the guidance of curators invited from different cities, the students of the “Workshop” mastered both the theory and practice of work in the areas of “Architecture and Urban Analysis”, “Economics”, “History”, “Ecology”, “Local Identity (Artists)”, and “Anthropology”. The work in 2024 is covered in more detail: the composition of the participants, the design and results of the study, the challenges encountered, and the project’s significance. A special feature of the 2024 project was the nature of the chosen territory: for the first time, attention was focused not on the central but on the peripheral urban spaces, which included buildings from the tuberculosis dispensary and factory production facilities. This presented many challenges for design. The difficulties of organizing the anthropological direction of such a project include tight deadlines and the intensity of the research process, combined with the need to introduce a new discipline to non-anthropologist participants; incomplete understanding of the specifics of urban anthropology on the part of the project organizers, participants in other directions, and jury members. Overall, the House of Architects project appears to be a highly effective form of industrial practice for students, a significant addition to the portfolio of young specialists, and a valuable introduction to colleagues, teachers, and potential employers. 

In this papers, the research fellow at the Center for Urban Studies at Tyumen State University and the head of student field studies for the Conceptual Urban Studies Master’s program writes about involving early career researchers in field research work. The key aspects of practice of the Center for Urban Studies are a) the predesign nature of the research, which involves students of the Master’s program; b) the student staff, which, in addition to bachelor’s graduates, includes many professionals working in the urban enterprises; c) a combination of practical and fundamental research tasks; d) the abductive logic of setting research tasks. The main principle of the student practices is to integrate fundamental sholarly tasks into applied pre-project research, in which not only are specific tasks set by the employer carried out, but also study is carried out on the situation from the point of view of the city process that they observe. Students typically work on basic research skills, primarily field skills — interviews, observations, keeping field diaries, etc. What is most important from an educational perspective is that the situation of fieldwork in real urban contexts, which differs from standard forms of training, reveals students’ knowledge and skills much more effectively than the classroom. While the project logic assumes that students are primarily data collectors performing specific technical tasks, the research logic aims for students to become data interpreters like their senior colleagues. 

This study examines the competing and coexisting narratives about the past of the territory where the Skolkovo Innovation Centre is located. The authors analyze the intersections and contradictions between the public image of Skolkovo as a project built “from scratch” and a locally preserved alternative narrative maintained by residents and employees of the Research Institute of Agriculture. The research is based on interviews, archival materials, and digital ethnography conducted within the framework of the HSE project workshop “Urban Historical Memory” and the “People’s History of Russia” project (2023–2025).

The key focus of the study is how various actors — media, state institutions, research institute employees, and local residents — construct the memory of the place. The public narrative, promoted in the media, portrays Skolkovo as an innovation cluster emerging from a “blank slate”, distancing it from its Soviet heritage and emphasizing a future-oriented agenda. In contrast, the alternative narrative, maintained by the Research Institute, stresses the historical continuity of the territory, linked to agricultural research, experimental fields, and the institute’s foundational role in local urban development during the Soviet era. Alongside this narrative, the study also explores urban folklore addressing the earlier history of the Skolkovo area.

Special attention is given to the materiality that sustains these narratives. The buildings of the research institute, archival photographs, and ongoing scientific activities reinforce the alternative version of the past, while media resources and Skolkovo’s infrastructure amplify the dominant narrative. Urban folklore — though untethered from material objects — persists due to its flexibility and dispersion, shaping multiple perceptions of the place.