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Biography | Research | Publications

Grigory Gorbun

Adjunct Instructor of Anthropology
MA, Paris-1 Panthéon-Sorbonne
Linguistic Anthropology, Law, Legal Profession
Lamar Hall 521 | 662-915-6533
ggorbun@olemis.edu

Office Hours: By appointment

Courses: Anth 101 Introduction to Anthropology

Biography

I was born in 1990 in Bibirevo, a neighborhood on the northern outskirts of Moscow, Russia, and raised in a family of two school teachers who were navigating the chaos of early post-Soviet Russia. From as far back as I can remember, I have always been fascinated by rules and the various ways in which people interpret, follow, bend, ignore, and break them. For my undergraduate degree, I studied History at Lomonosov Moscow State University and wrote my thesis on the notions of legal and illegal in the royal acts of medieval French kings. As I grappled with the alien notions of law that defined the political landscape of 11th-century France, I was exposed to works in Legal Anthropology, a discipline devoted to studying the diverse forms of normativity across human cultures. Captivated by this new field of studies, I applied and won a French government stipend to continue my education at the University of Paris, where I studied how French legal education changes students’ outlook on life. After finishing my Masters, I worked for a year as a junior researcher at the Moscow University of Justice before moving to the United States in 2016 to pursue a PhD in Anthropology at the University of Chicago. In Chicago, I was trained as a linguistic anthropologist, learning to see the life of big cultural concepts in the complexity and messiness of everyday interactions. I moved to Oxford, MS in 2019, right before the beginning of COVID-19 pandemic. After finishing my fieldwork among the legal professionals in Moscow, I joined the Department of Sociology and Anthropology as an adjunct instructor, seeking to gain teaching experience while finishing my dissertation.

Research

My research focuses on the production and contestations of the authority of law within various social settings. My dissertation investigates how legal professionals in Russia utilize moot courts – educational role-playing games – as a mechanism for shaping and reproducing cultural ideas of law and legal authority. This encompasses a multiscaled and multi-sited study of moot court competitions in Russia, analysis of participant interactions, prevailing legal ideologies, and the institutional role of moot courts in the Russian legal landscape. Beyond the dissertation, my research extends to diverse sites of production and contestation of legal authority, from the role of language and discourse in early stages of legal education to analyzing decision-making processes in police actions during protests. I am also developing a new research project, focusing on the production of authority in alternative dispute resolution and transformative justice.

Selected Publications

Peer Reviewed Journal Articles