Ilya Utekhin

PhD in Anthropology, Professor, Dept. of Anthropology, European University at St.Petersburg, Russia. Academic interests include anthropology of technology, cognitive science, human-computer interaction, conversation analysis, visual anthropology.

He was Нead of Department between 2002 and 2008, and holds this position from 2015. He leads EUSP Multimedia Initiatives Unit and is in charge of MOOCs production in EUSP. He has also been teaching at the Faculty of Liberal Arts and Sciences, St.Petersburg State University, where in 2007-10 he directed Program on Semiotics and Communication Theory. His research interests are rather broad and range from semiotics and social history of the Soviet society to conversation analysis, cognitive science, and human-computer interaction. He is author of monographic study of communal apartments in the USSR (Essays on Communal Everyday Life, Moscow, OGI, 2001; 2004 – in Russian) that was to become not only widely known beyond academia, but also led to a visual anthropological project of the Virtual Museum of Soviet Everyday Life (http://kommunalka.colgate.edu ), a video-based museum composed in cooperation with colleagues from Cornell and Colgate universities. Among his recent publications there is a brochure on the regimes of use and the usability of downtown urban public spaces (Place of Action. Public space and ritual in postsoviet city. STRELKA Insitute of Media, Architecture, and design, 2013).