Personal website

In my research I am mostly interested in ethnic groups and categories and inequalities in education, both in Russia and the UK.

Recently completed and ongoing projects:

1. Ethnic differences in reading and mathematical test performance in primary school in England.

I use school census data from the National Pupil Database to explore reading and maths test scores across ethnic categories and document changes between 2007 and 2018. In most ethnic categories children now perform at the same level or better than their White British peers.

A.Bessudnov. (2023). “Ethnic differences in reading and mathematical test performance in primary schools in England.” SocArXiv. April 20. [DOI]

2. Ethnic and regional inequalities in the Russian military fatalities in the war in Ukraine.

I use a crowdsourced data set on the Russian military fatalities in Ukraine to analyse how the fatality rates varied by ethnicity and region.

A.Bessudnov. (2023). “Ethnic and regional inequalities in Russian military fatalities in Ukraine: Preliminary findings from crowdsourced data.” Demographic Research 48 (31): 883-898. [DOI]

3. Ethnic groups on the Russian social media.

VK, the largest Russian social media website, provides an API that can be used for downloading data for social research. However, VK does not record users' ethnicity. In a recent working paper we developed an ML-based method to code perceived ethnicity with the data on personal names.

A.Bessudnov et al. (2023). "Predicting perceived ethnicity with data on personal names in Russia". Journal of Computational Social Science. [Open access]

I hold an undergraduate degree in history from St.Petersburg State University (2003), a master's in sociology from the European University at St.Petersburg (2004) and a DPhil from the University of Oxford (2011). In 2010-11 I was a Max Weber Postdoctoral Fellow at the European University Institute in Florence. In 2011 I moved to Moscow where I was an Assistant Professor in Sociology at the National Research University Higher School of Economics until September 2014 when I took a position of a Lecturer in Quantitative Sociology in Exeter.

I am happy to supervise PhD students who want to use quantitative methods to study 1) ethnic inequalities in education in the UK (in particular, using the National Pupil Database), 2) more generally, social stratification, ethnic groups and educational inequalities in the UK, 3) ethnic groups, migration, social stratification, education, and the labour market in Russia.