On Being an Independent Scholar
*last updated on January 26, 2026
I call myself an independent scholar. By that I do not mean an academic job title. I mean a way of working: sustained study, careful reading, and the ongoing effort to make sense of difficult questions over time. In everyday English, "scientist" is often heard as someone whose work looks like experiments or lab-based research. My work sits mostly in the humanities and social sciences, and it is interpretive and synthesis-driven, so “scholar” fits better.
This website is the main place where I practice that scholarship in public. Me, Looking for Meaning is an ongoing project about how human beings make sense of their lives and of each other. I return to the same cluster of questions again and again: meaning, power, communication, conflict, self-awareness, empathy and compassion, understanding and misunderstanding. The pages are connected because the ideas are connected. If you read this project as a set of isolated essays, it can look eclectic. If you read it as a web of related inquiries, the continuity becomes clearer.
My approach is shaped by long academic training in two systems. I began my studies in Russia at Saint Petersburg State University, in a program rooted in philosophy and related humanistic traditions. I completed a five-year Specialist degree (a structure different from the U.S. bachelor’s and master’s sequence) and then continued with a postgraduate research degree (a Candidate of Sciences, broadly comparable to a PhD) in the social sciences and humanities. That training was broadly interdisciplinary. It gave me deep exposure to theories of culture, society, and human behavior across fields such as philosophy, sociology, history, psychology, anthropology, and linguistics.
I continued my education in the United States in a doctoral program in media and communication at Temple University in Philadelphia (2011–2015). There, my work became more research-oriented in the U.S. sense of the term: collecting and analyzing data and learning methodological rigor, especially within qualitative and interpretive traditions. Over time my interests moved across topics—intercultural media and translation, media and gender, media literacy and education—but the underlying question remained stable: how communication shapes human relationships, and how people explain conflict, responsibility, and harm.
I also work professionally as a copyeditor of academic texts in the social sciences and humanities. That work keeps me in close contact with scholarly argumentation, methods, and debates across disciplines. It is not a substitute for doing original scholarship, but it is part of the environment in which I think and write: a steady immersion in how scholars build claims, use evidence, and position their ideas in relation to other work. Between my formal education and my ongoing professional engagement, scholarship is not something I visit occasionally. It is part of my daily life.
The method of this project is interpretive and connective. I read widely, think slowly, and try to write clearly about complicated issues without hiding behind jargon. When I use the word “study,” I mean careful, extended examination of a question—tracing concepts, comparing perspectives, noticing patterns, and testing how an idea holds up when applied to real situations. In graduate school I learned specific research methods, but the kind of work that matters most to this project is synthesis: bringing together insights that are often separated by disciplinary boundaries or by academic and public forms of writing.
The structure of the project is also deliberate. I am influenced by postmodern thinkers who describe knowledge as nonlinear and networked rather than neatly hierarchical. Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizome metaphor captures something important about how this site grows: ideas branch, cross, reconnect, and develop in multiple directions at once. A page is rarely the final word on a topic. It is a node in a larger conversation.
Interdisciplinarity is central to what I do. It is a strength because it makes certain connections easier to see—connections that can be harder to notice when one must stay tightly inside a single specialized vocabulary or research tradition. It is also a challenge. Breadth can create the risk of superficiality, and I take that risk seriously. My goal here is often to map relationships between ideas, clarify tensions, and open paths for deeper exploration, rather than to produce the most specialized treatment of a single narrow problem. When a topic deserves deeper drilling, I try to point outward, so readers can follow sources and pursue the line of inquiry further.
My interdisciplinarity sometimes extends beyond the social sciences and humanities in a cautious, limited way. I am not a physicist, and I do not treat physics as an authority I can speak for. But I am interested in how the sciences describe scale, reality, and the limits of human intuition, and I sometimes borrow concepts as metaphors or contrasts. For example, in Media Is Us I used the contrast between quantum behavior at microscopic scales and classical behavior at macroscopic scales to think about the difference between individual interactions and large-scale social forces. In this project, these moments are meant to widen perspective, not to make technical claims outside my competence.
Hypertext is the best container I have found for this kind of work. A book has strengths I value deeply—coherence, final form, a fixed arc—but it is also finished. This project is designed to remain open: to grow by addition, revision, and cross-linking as my thinking changes and as I encounter new ideas. The links are not decoration. They are part of the argument. They show conceptual pathways, make influences visible, and give readers a way to check sources and continue reading beyond a single page.
If you explore this site, the best way to read it is to follow the threads. Start anywhere, but do not assume each page is meant to stand alone. The project is a long-form attempt to understand how human beings make meaning, how meanings shape power, and how both show up in ordinary life. That is the work I am doing here, as an independent scholar, in the format that fits it best.
About this project: Start page
This website is the main place where I practice that scholarship in public. Me, Looking for Meaning is an ongoing project about how human beings make sense of their lives and of each other. I return to the same cluster of questions again and again: meaning, power, communication, conflict, self-awareness, empathy and compassion, understanding and misunderstanding. The pages are connected because the ideas are connected. If you read this project as a set of isolated essays, it can look eclectic. If you read it as a web of related inquiries, the continuity becomes clearer.
My approach is shaped by long academic training in two systems. I began my studies in Russia at Saint Petersburg State University, in a program rooted in philosophy and related humanistic traditions. I completed a five-year Specialist degree (a structure different from the U.S. bachelor’s and master’s sequence) and then continued with a postgraduate research degree (a Candidate of Sciences, broadly comparable to a PhD) in the social sciences and humanities. That training was broadly interdisciplinary. It gave me deep exposure to theories of culture, society, and human behavior across fields such as philosophy, sociology, history, psychology, anthropology, and linguistics.
I continued my education in the United States in a doctoral program in media and communication at Temple University in Philadelphia (2011–2015). There, my work became more research-oriented in the U.S. sense of the term: collecting and analyzing data and learning methodological rigor, especially within qualitative and interpretive traditions. Over time my interests moved across topics—intercultural media and translation, media and gender, media literacy and education—but the underlying question remained stable: how communication shapes human relationships, and how people explain conflict, responsibility, and harm.
I also work professionally as a copyeditor of academic texts in the social sciences and humanities. That work keeps me in close contact with scholarly argumentation, methods, and debates across disciplines. It is not a substitute for doing original scholarship, but it is part of the environment in which I think and write: a steady immersion in how scholars build claims, use evidence, and position their ideas in relation to other work. Between my formal education and my ongoing professional engagement, scholarship is not something I visit occasionally. It is part of my daily life.
The method of this project is interpretive and connective. I read widely, think slowly, and try to write clearly about complicated issues without hiding behind jargon. When I use the word “study,” I mean careful, extended examination of a question—tracing concepts, comparing perspectives, noticing patterns, and testing how an idea holds up when applied to real situations. In graduate school I learned specific research methods, but the kind of work that matters most to this project is synthesis: bringing together insights that are often separated by disciplinary boundaries or by academic and public forms of writing.
The structure of the project is also deliberate. I am influenced by postmodern thinkers who describe knowledge as nonlinear and networked rather than neatly hierarchical. Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizome metaphor captures something important about how this site grows: ideas branch, cross, reconnect, and develop in multiple directions at once. A page is rarely the final word on a topic. It is a node in a larger conversation.
Interdisciplinarity is central to what I do. It is a strength because it makes certain connections easier to see—connections that can be harder to notice when one must stay tightly inside a single specialized vocabulary or research tradition. It is also a challenge. Breadth can create the risk of superficiality, and I take that risk seriously. My goal here is often to map relationships between ideas, clarify tensions, and open paths for deeper exploration, rather than to produce the most specialized treatment of a single narrow problem. When a topic deserves deeper drilling, I try to point outward, so readers can follow sources and pursue the line of inquiry further.
My interdisciplinarity sometimes extends beyond the social sciences and humanities in a cautious, limited way. I am not a physicist, and I do not treat physics as an authority I can speak for. But I am interested in how the sciences describe scale, reality, and the limits of human intuition, and I sometimes borrow concepts as metaphors or contrasts. For example, in Media Is Us I used the contrast between quantum behavior at microscopic scales and classical behavior at macroscopic scales to think about the difference between individual interactions and large-scale social forces. In this project, these moments are meant to widen perspective, not to make technical claims outside my competence.
Hypertext is the best container I have found for this kind of work. A book has strengths I value deeply—coherence, final form, a fixed arc—but it is also finished. This project is designed to remain open: to grow by addition, revision, and cross-linking as my thinking changes and as I encounter new ideas. The links are not decoration. They are part of the argument. They show conceptual pathways, make influences visible, and give readers a way to check sources and continue reading beyond a single page.
If you explore this site, the best way to read it is to follow the threads. Start anywhere, but do not assume each page is meant to stand alone. The project is a long-form attempt to understand how human beings make meaning, how meanings shape power, and how both show up in ordinary life. That is the work I am doing here, as an independent scholar, in the format that fits it best.
About this project: Start page
