Research Seminar in Sociology

On Wednesday, March 15, Caroline Hill from Uppsala University will present her research on "Framing of Abortion and Church-State Relations in Russian Orthodox Online Portals." As usual, the seminar will take place at 10 am in room ME014.

n the years following the fall of the Soviet Union, clerics and others serving in the Russian Orthodox Church have become active participants in debates over morality policy issues in the Russian public sphere. One of the topics about which these actors have spoken is access to abortion in Russia. When presenting arguments on abortion before the Russian public, clerics and others serving in the Russian Orthodox Church must grapple with two legacies of the Soviet system: the history of abortion as a preferred birth control method, and the fact that most self-declared Orthodox Christians are nominal and non-practicing.

With this in mind, this research project adapts and applies typologies previously used in prior research of morality policy in the West and church-state relations in Russia to these actors’ statements concerning regulation of abortion via Russian Orthodox online media sources from 2000 through 2020. By doing so, the author hopes to contribute to studies of morality framing practices and attitudes toward the state in political science and political sociology. By focusing on the case of Russian Orthodox clerics and Russian Orthodox online media, this project intends to expand morality policy research toward inclusion of a non-state actor—the Russian Orthodox Church—that is not often studied from this angle. Furthermore, by focusing on clerics and others serving in the Russian Orthodox Church and Russian Orthodox online media, the project seeks to contribute to research on the mediatization of Russian Orthodoxy within sociology of religion.