Research-Educational Group "Inclusive Society: comparative analysis of structural conditions and opinions of insiders in Russia and neighboring countries"

In 2012, the Russian Federation signed and ratified the UN International Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, calling, among other things, for a revision of the basic approaches to working with people with special needs and emphasizing the need to develop an inclusive society that provides opportunities for the development of all individuals. At the moment, at the level of formal obligations, all educational institutions in Russia are considered inclusive, but in practice it turns out that only a small part of them are ready to accept students with disabilities. The barriers in this case are the unfavorable physical environment, various social difficulties caused by the unavailability of society in general and teachers in particular. It becomes extremely important to study the conditions in which inclusion is formed, as well as the factors contributing to or hindering these processes. At the same time, the policy of inclusion has been updated in the social policy of many countries of the world, and a number of states have already accumulated extensive experience in implementing such a policy. Integration into these global processes and their adaptation in local conditions are uneven, with different speeds and different effects in Russia and other former Soviet republics. 

In order to study these conditions in 2020, a Research-Educational Group called "Inclusive Society: a comparative analysis of the structural conditions and opinions of insiders in Russia and neighboring countries" under the leadership of Elena Iarskaia-Smirnova was created within the framework of the competition. Students, postgraduate and teachers of the Department of Sociology of the Higher School of Economics become members of the Research-Educational Group. 

The project implemented by the Research-Educational Group was called "Factors of school inclusion of children with disabilities in post-Soviet countries: the role of social capital". Its purpose is to obtain new unique scientific data on the role of social capital and other factors and elements of the process of school inclusion in the context of the transformation of general education in the comparative perspective of analyzing the situation in Russia and neighboring countries.