Yakov Lurie, M.A.

Since October 2026, I have been teaching and working as a social anthropologist at the University of Göttingen, while completing my PhD in Anthropology at the University of Amsterdam.

My research is broadly concerned with how people make their lives and identities under conditions of mobility, uncertainty, and social change. My PhD project explores the spaces and lifeworlds that have emerged along Russia’s highways since the collapse of the Soviet Union, focusing on small-scale roadside entrepreneurs and the ways they navigate uncertainty amid infrastructural, economic, and political shifts. This research grew out of earlier mobile ethnography with Russian long-distance truck drivers and a broader interest in roads, informal economies, and experiences of postsocialist transformations.

Since 2022, another major strand of my work has focused on the transformations of Russian society brought about by the war against Ukraine. As a member of the Public Sociology Laboratory (PS Lab), I have studied everyday life in wartime Russia, perceptions and experiences of the war, and changing forms of social participation under wartime conditions.

I have also collaborated with other research initiatives, including OutRush, CISR e.V. Berlin, and the Hannah Arendt Research Center, on projects exploring wartime migration from Russia and independent civil society both inside the country and in exile.

Alongside academic research and teaching, I have worked on applied ethnographic projects with NGOs and in the fields of urban development, media, and the arts. I am interested in forms of anthropology that go beyond academic settings and in finding accessible, engaging, and useful ways of communicating ethnographic knowledge.

I also have a long-standing background in film: before becoming an anthropologist, I studied film and worked as a film critic and with international film festivals. Film remains an important part of my interests, especially the intersections between anthropology, cinema, and visual culture — from ethnographic and documentary practices to the social lives of images.