Before the Panopticon: School Building and the Idea of "Observation" in Russia in the First Half of the 18th Century

​This seminar explores the emergence of school building as a disciplinary instrument in early modern Russia. The techniques of manipulating a subject’s space and time in order to achieve the "conduct of conduct" are in many ways central for modern governance, and so this talk traces them taking hold in Russian education from Peter I to Catherine II.

Organizationally, the pre-Petrine and early Petrine school was a relatively unstructured community of students congregating around a "master"-teacher; the building itself was not conceptualized as an instrument of instruction, and schools occupied random facilities or shared them with other agencies and units. By the mid-18th century, however, the building was increasingly viewed as central for a school: it came to be accepted that students should be, ideally, contained within an enclosed, dedicated compound that insulates them from the outside world and structures their daily routine. This comes, of course, hand in hand with the increasing focus on vospitanie, on interiorization of prescribed models of conduct and thinking, as opposed to just the acquisition of certain skills. This works follows this evolution, first, pointing out the central role played in it by enterprising "projectors"  (and by implication, also questioning the role of the abstract "state"); and second, demonstrating how the school building was reinterpreted by different players in order to fit their agendas  - and how this very susceptibility to reinterpretation facilitated the process of its acceptance. This seminar is related to the speaker’s current monograph project on the ways in which "administrative entrepreneurs" drove institutional chance in early modern Russian schools.

Igor Fedyukin is Associate Professor of History at the National Research University – Higher School of Economics in Moscow and a Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in 2015-16.His research focuses on the history and politics of education, and his forthcoming monograph explores the role of administrative entrepreneurs, or “projectors,” in building new organizational forms in Russian schooling under Peter I and his immediate successors. Fedyukin received his Ph.D. in history from the University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill. He was a director for policy studies at the New Economic School in Moscow in 2007-2012 and a deputy minister of education and science of Russia in 2012-2013. Fedyukin has held appointments as a Diderot Fellow (2010-2012) and Directeur d’Études Associés (June-July 2015) at the Foundation Maison des Sciences de l’Homme in Paris and a visiting fellow at the Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen in Vienna (May 2015).