The Laboratory announces the next regular seminar (project workshop), which will be held in Moscow on March 29 at 18:00 in St.Petersburg (10^th Line, 3, room 117a). Videoconference with Moscow (Kochnovskiy Pr. 3, room 306) office will be provided. Also the live broadcast will be organized. The link will be at this announcement at 6 p.m. on March 22. After the seminar a videotape will be put up after the summary of the presentation.

Veronika Kostenko, Research Fellow of LCSR, will deliver a report "Archaicism or Modernization? Impact of Age and Education on Attitudes in the Arab World".

The project is based on the 1^st wave of Arab Barometer project which collects the data from 7 Arab Muslim societies: Morocco, Kuwait, Algeria, Lebanon, Jordan, Yemen, and Palestine. In this survey we explore the relations of age, gender and level of education with the idea of equal rights of men and women in various social spheres. Index of Gender Equality was built and used as a dependent variable in this research. It is assumed that two processes develop simultaneously in the Arab East which are Modernization and Islamization. The first process is characterized by the growing number of educated people among younger generations; people aged 25-35 have the highest levels of formal education. Surprisingly, they tend to be the most conservative and chauvinistic in the gender sense. Those who are 65-75 years old now often lack formal education, but show extremely high levels in attitudes towards gender equality which can be compared to such liberal countries as Switzerland or Norway. Another observation shows that in one age group more educated people tend to be more liberal in their gender attitudes that their undereducated counterparts.

This phenomenon is analyzed using the Modernization theory of R. Inglehart, the theory of stability of attitudes by Newcomb and Alwin as well as literature on nationalism in Arab countries.

Everyone interested is invited!

Students, professors and employees of HSE have to take their passes with them. All the guests are asked to send e-mail to m.marinanikitina@gmail.com (in Moscow) ormariyaravlik@gmail.com (in St.Petersburg) before noon in the day of the event.