held its XXXVI session on December 2–3, 2021

The annual session was devoted to the 90^th anniversary of the participation of the Soviet delegation in the Second International Congress of the History of Science in London. This event was a milestone in the history of social studies of science and contributed to the formation of this field in the Soviet Union. At the coming S. A. Kugel International School, we discussed the history of the Second International Congress of the History of Science in London, the creative work and biographies of the participants of the Soviet delegation with special attention to B. M. Hessen in the context of the urgent questions of the modern sociology of science. The well-known researchers, lecturers, research fellows, young scientists, and students were participated in that event. The program of the Session and picture report is published at the webpage of the St. Petersburg Branch of S. I. Vavilov Institute for the History of Science and Technology of the Russian Academy of Sciences http://ihst.nw.ru/36kugel-photo/

In particular, the session discussed the academic papers concerned with the following themes and related questions:
• social history of science as a special field of the science of science;
• the formation of the philosophy and sociology of science in Russia;
• wissenssoziologie as a prehistory of the sociology of science;
• B. M. Hessen as philosopher and historian of science;
• history of the Second International Congress of the History of Science;
• Institute for the History of Science and Technology and formation of the community of historians of science and technology in Russia;
• the origins of the R. K. Merton’s sociology of science;
• sociology of science in the USSR: schools, centers, traditions;
• Institute for the History of Science and Technology and Soviet sociology of science;
• the origins of the Russian sociology of science in the context of the world sociological thought;
• the problem of the social determination of knowledge;
• the strong programme of the sociology of knowledge vs classical sociology of science;
• science as a social institution: structure and principles;
• competitiveness of the Russian science in the face of internationalization;
• social stratification in science: communities, careers, elites;
• preliminary results of the reforms of science in the post-Soviet space: the origins, regional peculiarities, the essential results and perspectives;
• the financing of science: principles, traditions, reforms.

Organizers of the Session:
• St. Petersburg Scientific Center of the Russian Academy of Sciences
• St. Petersburg Branch of the Institute for History of Science and Technology of the Russian Academy of Sciences
• Research Committee 23 on Sociology of Science and Technology of the International Sociological Association
• Department of Sociology of St. Petersburg State University
• St. Petersburg Association for Sociologists
• Research Committee for Sociology of Science and Technology of the Russian Society of Sociologists

Working languages were Russian and English. The conference held in blended format (videoconferences and in-person meetings). The main venue was the Conference hall of the St. Petersburg Branch of S. I. Vavilov Institute for the History of Science and Technology of the Russian Academy of Sciences.

The papers presented at the conference are published in the Journal «The Problems of Scientist and Scientific Groups Activity» (http://ihst.nw.ru/pub/problem/) indexed in the Russian Science Citation Index