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Inna Leykin, Senior Lecturer

Contact Info

The Open University of Israel Department of Sociology, Political Science and Communication 1 University Road P.O.B. 808 Ra’anana 43107, Israel
Office:972-9-7781720 Email:innale@openu.ac.il

Areas of Interest
  • Politics of knowledge
  • Political anthropology
  • Soviet and post-Soviet studies
  • Anthropology of science and policy
  • Kinship and relatedness

Inna Leykin is a senior lecturer at the Department of Sociology, Political Science and Communication. Trained as a cultural anthropologist, she studies the interactions between the cultures of intellectual expertise and policymaking, the democratic transformations in postsocialist countries, cultural significance of statistical knowledge and emerging practices of the self in contemporary Russia. 

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2013
Ph.D. Department of Anthropology, Brown University, Providence, RI, USA
2008
MA Department of Anthropology, Brown University, Providence, RI, USA
2003
BA Department of Sociology & Anthropology, Tel Aviv University, Israel
2024-
Senior Lecturer, Department of Sociology, Political Science and Communication, The Open University of Israel
2022-2023
Visiting Scholar, Mongolia and Inner Asia Studies Unit, Department of Social Anthropology, University of Cambridge
2016 - 2024
Lecturer, Department of Sociology, Political Science and Communication, The Open University of Israel
2014 - 2016
Visiting Lecturer, Department of Sociology, Political Science and Communication, The Open University of Israel
2013 - 2014
Postdoctoral Fellow, The Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics, Tel Aviv University
2012 - 2013
Ginsberg Postdoctoral Fellow, Department of Sociology & Anthropology, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
2020
The Louis Guttman Best Article Prize, awarded by the Israeli Sociological Association, for the article “When Borders Migrate: Reconstructing the Statistical Category of International Migrant,” co-authored with Anastasia Gorodzeisky, Sociology 54 (1) 2020: 142-158
2016
The inaugural Soyuz Article Prize, awarded by the American Anthropological Association’s Post-Communist Cultural Studies Group for “Rodologia: Genealogy as Therapy in Post-Soviet Russia.” Ethos 43 (2) 2015: 135-164

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Inna Leykin and Anastasia Gorodzeisky. 2024. “Is anti-immigrant sentiment owned by the political right?” Sociology 58 (1):3-22.  https://doi.org/10.1177/00380385231161206

Leykin, Inna, and Michele Rivkin-Fish. 2022. “Politicized Demography and Biomedical Authority in Post-Soviet Russia.” Medical Anthropology 41 (6–7): 702–17.

Gorodzeisky, Anastasia, and Inna Leykin. 2022. “On the West–East Methodological Bias in Measuring International Migration.” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 48 (13): 3160–83. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369183X.2021.1873116. [equal contribution].

Leykin, Inna. 2021. “Toxic Memories and Amateur Genealogy in Contemporary Russia.” Rural History Yearbook 18: 67-83. http://doi: 10.25365/rhy-2021-5

Leykin, Inna. 2020. “Uneasy Translations: Vernacularizing Demography for Post-Soviet Statecraft.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 26 (1): 86–104. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9655.13178.

Gorodzeisky, Anastasia, and Inna Leykin. 2020. “When Borders Migrate: Reconstructing the Category of ‘International Migrant.’” Sociology 54 (1): 142–58. https://doi.org/10.1177/0038038519860403. Winner of the 2020 The Louis Guttman Best Article Prize, awarded by the Israeli Sociological Association
[The authors are listed alphabetically. They contributed equally to this work].

Leykin, Inna. 2019. “The History and Afterlife of Soviet Demography: The Socialist Roots of Post-Soviet Neoliberalism.” Slavic Review 78 (1): 149–72. https://doi.org/10.1017/slr.2019.12.

Leykin, Inna. 2015. “Rodologia: Genealogy as Therapy in Post-Soviet Russia.” Ethos 43 (2): 135–64. https://doi.org/10.1111/etho.12078. Winner of the 2016 Annual Soyuz Article Prize, American Anthropological Association

Leykin, Inna. 2011. “Population Prescriptions: (Sanitary) Culture and Biomedical Authority in Contemporary Russia.” Anthropology of East Europe Review 29 (1): 60–81.

Herzog, Hanna, Smadar Sharon, and Inna Leykin. 2008. “Racism and the Politics of Signification: Israeli Public Discourse on Racism towards Palestinian Citizens.” Ethnic and Racial Studies 31 (6): 1091–1109.

[forhcoming] Caring like a state: The Politics of Russia’s Demographic Crisis (under advanced contract with Indiana University Press).

(Leykin, Inna and Anastasia Gorodzeisky. 2024.“Post-Soviet Russia: Anti-Immigrant Sentiment and Discourses of National Identity.” In Handbook on Immigration and Nationalism, ed. Michael Samers and Jens Rydgren, 88-113. Edward Elgar. https://www.elgaronline.com/edcollchap/book/9781839100765/book-part-9781839100765-11.xml

Leykin, Inna. 2013. “‘Men of War- Soldiers of Peace’: Disabled World War II Veterans, Immigrants from the FSU in the Israeli Public Space.” In “Russians” in Israel and Beyond: The Meanings of Culture in Discourse and Practice, edited by Julia Lerner and Rivka Feldhay, 364–91. Jerusalem: Hakibbutz Hameuchad and The Van Leer Jerusalem Institute. [Hebrew]

Leykin, Inna. 2011. “’Your Alma-Mater is not like my Alma-Mater:’ students and liberal arts education in the U.S. and Israel.” In Youth in a Changing World, ed. Dementieva. E.A, Lashevskaya A.D. Pp. 137-148. Yekaterinburg: The Ural State Pedagogical University. [Russian]

Herzog, Hanna, Inna Leykin, and Smadar Sharon. 2008. “‘Are We Racists?!’: Racism toward Palestinian citizens as reflected in Israeli printed media (1949-2000).” In Racism in Israel, edited by Yehouda Shenhav and Yossi Yona, 1–36. Jerusalem: The Van Leer Jerusalem Institute.

Review of “Replacing the Dead: The Politics of Reproduction in the Postwar Soviet Union,” by Mie Nakachi. Oxford University Press, 2021, 348 p., $39.95.” Population and Development Review 47 (4) 2021: 1215–17.

Review of “Dying Unneeded: The Cultural Context of the Russian Mortality Crisis,” by Michelle A. Parsons. Anthropological Quarterly 88 (4) 2015: 1105-1110

Review of “Communism on Tomorrow Street: Mass Housing and Everyday Life after Stalin,” by Steven Harris.” Anthropology of East Europe Review 32 (1) 2014: 76-78

A feature not a bug: how Putin’s autocratic regime undermines its own social contract,” Ynet, May 9, 2022. https://www.ynet.co.il/news/article/hjad7uul5 [in Hebrew]

“The caring state: how Russia’s new babushkas are filling in the welfare gaps,” openDemocracy Russia Blog, September 25, 2017. https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/odr/russia-the-caring-state/

“‘Population Prescriptions:’ Pronatalism and the Fear of Underpopulation in Post-Soviet Russia,” The Somatoshpere: Science, Medicine, and Anthropology Blog, December 26, 2011. http://somatosphere.net/2011/population-prescriptions-pronatalism-and-the-fear-of-underpopulation-in-post-soviet-russia.html/

2022 Introduction to Anthropology, Raanana: Open University Press

State in an Age of Globalization: Anthropological Perspectives, Raanana: Open University Press, 2017

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2020 – 2024 Israeli Science Foundation Personal Research Grant (grant No. 948/20) with Prof. Anastasia Gorodzeisky, Tel Aviv University for “When Categories Travel: The Social Meanings of Migration-Related Measures”
 

2019 Visiting Scholar Fellowship, The Institute of Public Administration, The Ural Federal University, Yekaterinburg, Russia

 

2014 Career Development Grant, The Open University of Israel for :The Politics of Demographic Knowledge in Post-Soviet Russia”

 

2014 - 2015 The Professor Jonathan Shapira Postdoctoral Fellowship, Department of Sociology & Anthropology, Tel Aviv University (declined)

 

2013-2014  The Inter-University Academic Partnership in Russian and East European Studies Fellowship (declined)

 

2013 - 2014  Edmond J. Safra Fellowship, Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics, Tel Aviv University

 

2012 - 2013  Ginsberg Fellowship, Morris Ginsberg Fund, Hebrew University of Jerusalem

 

2009 – 2010 (NSF) National Science Foundation Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant, Cultural Anthropology, Award # 0921638 for “’Reproducing Russians:’Population Science, Policy, and Kinship in 21st Century Russia”