Ilya I. DOKUCHAEV Saint Petersburg State University
7-9, Universitetskaya nab., Saint Petersburg, 199034, Russian Federation
Head of the Department of Ontology and Theory of Knowledge of the Institute of Philosophy
Doctor of Science (Philosophy)
Professor
e-mail: ilya_dokuchaev@mail.ru
ORCID: 0000-0002-0506-2927
Dokuchaev, I. (2026) Cultural Studies as a Russian Scientific and Educational Project (2025) Fantastic Spaces of UtopiaAbstract: This article examines the role of cultural studies in the development of sovereign Russian education. To determine this role, an attempt is made to elucidate the place of cultural studies within the system of modern science, its subject matter, and the structure of training qualified cultural studies specialists. A special aspect of the article is the analysis of the most recent significant reform of Russian education, which involved the abolition of the Bologna principles but remains linked to the competency-based approach implemented over the past twenty years. It is shown that cultural studies belongs to the four fundamental sciences of the second level of knowledge and, in terms of the scope of its subject matter, is located between universal philosophy and the individual cultural sciences. Along with cultural studies, the fundamental sciences include natural science, social theory, and anthropology. This architecture is based on the concept of four key regions of existence, distinguishing between nature, culture, society, and humanity. However, only cultural studies – unlike the other three fundamental sciences – has managed to formulate the subject of its research in such a way that it is simultaneously part of all cultural sciences, yet not studied by these sciences, representing a distinct object, reconstructed through the analysis of any cultural artifact. This concerns values, which constitute the unique subject of cultural studies. No country in the world has implemented a program for studying values as the agents that produce and integrate culture into a coherent whole within a given spatiotemporal localization of ideals (cultural-historical types), except Russia, where cultural studies has become both a scientific and educational discipline. To preserve cultural studies as a unique national scientific and educational heritage, and to ensure that Russian education truly becomes sovereign, a draft curriculum for the training of cultural studies specialists is proposed. This curriculum includes approximately eighty subjects in applied, fundamental, and specialized cycles, covering theoretical and historical, as well as national and global, variations of the factuality under study.
Key words: Sovereign national education, cultural studies, competency-based approach, values, cultural education, structure of science, fundamental knowledge, cultural sciences.
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For Citation: Dokuchaev, I. (2026) Cultural Studies as a Russian Scientific and Educational Project (2025) Fantastic Spaces of Utopia. International Journal of Cultural Research, 1 (62). 6–16. DOI: 10.52173/2079-1100_2026_1_6
DOI: 10.52173/2079-1100_2026_1_6
