Dmitrii Serebrennikov
Empirical legal studies · Sociology of culture · Criminology · Computational social science
Positions
Research director, Kazakhstan Sociology Lab, Astana
Research fellow, Institute for the Rule of Law, European University at Saint Petersburg
Based in Astana, Kazakhstan
Contact
I am a sociologist working in empirical legal studies and the sociology of law, with computational and survey methods. Most of my published work sits at one of two intersections. With the sociology of culture: how legal and administrative categories are produced, applied and contested — officials’ perceptions of dangerous spaces, emergency-call classification, forensic expertise. With criminology: victimization measurement, near-repeat crime patterns, policing and surveillance infrastructures. Alongside this I have led policy research in Kazakhstan, on administrative microdata, citizens’ appeals to government agencies, legislative readability and open data.
My current work is in the culture-and-cognition tradition. Empirical research on legal legitimacy assumes a shared referent: that “the law”, “the rule”, “the right” mean roughly the same thing to everyone asked whether they are legitimate. I am testing the alternative — that these terms are organised into distinct cultural schemas (semantic networks), unevenly distributed across a population, and that which schema a person holds bears on what they do: report to the police, file a complaint, comply, stay silent.
I came to this by an indirect route. I studied history as an undergraduate, and moved into sociology through fieldwork during my MA: interviews and observation in emergency call centres and camera monitoring rooms. Computational methods came last, because I realized that some questions traditionally addressed through qualitative methods can now be measured using NLP, machine learning etc. What has stayed constant is an interest in classification systems and orders of rules. What has changed recently is the location of the question — from classification as institutions perform it to classification as the people being classified hold it.
Selected works: Near-repeat victimization across urban morphologies (Journal of Criminal Justice, 2026); Patterns of CCTV placement in four European capitals (Journal of Computational Social Science, 2024); Russian Crime Victimization Survey, 2018–2024 (SSRN, 2026).
Education
| Degree | Details | Institution | Period |
|---|---|---|---|
| Professional Certificate Programme, Applied Data Science | Full-tuition merit scholarship, awarded to top-performing admitted students. Final project: an application recognising text in photographs of archival Jewish gravestones, built for historical research; project manager of the team and ML developer. | European University at Saint Petersburg × Yandex | 2020–2021 |
| M.A., Sociology | Full-tuition merit scholarship, awarded to top-performing admitted students. Thesis: Street-Level Security: Managerial Logics of Safety and Urban Video Surveillance Systems in Towns and Cities — a qualitative study of camera monitoring centres, with an analysis of Moscow placement patterns using LASSO regularization and complementary log-log regression. | European University at Saint Petersburg | 2018–2020 |
| B.A., Russian History | Admission on a fully state-funded place, awarded competitively by entrance-examination results. Capstone: The Political Struggles of Regional Soviets of People’s Deputies in Western Siberia, 1991–1993. | Novosibirsk State University | 2013–2017 |
Career
| Role | Details | Organisation | Period |
|---|---|---|---|
| Research Director | Kazakhstan Sociology Lab by El Umiti Foundation, Astana | 2023 – present | |
| Research Fellow | Remote since 2022. | Institute for the Rule of Law, European University at Saint Petersburg | 2020 – present |
| Research Director | Research Fellow in 2024. | MIND, Maqsut Narikbayev University, Astana | 2024–2025 |
| Visiting Researcher | Nazarbayev University, Astana | 2022–2023 | |
| Intern | Institute for the Rule of Law, EUSP | 2019–2020 |
Grants & awards
Research grant no. BR28713139, Ministry of Science and Higher Education of the Republic of Kazakhstan — 2025–2027 “Computational Social Science: New Horizons in Methodology and Evidence-Based Policy.” Core team member.
Vladimir Potanin Scholarship — 2019–2020 Merit-based national scholarship, awarded competitively to master’s students.
Service
EUSP R-meetup group — 2020–2022. Organiser.
President, University Student Council, European University at Saint Petersburg — 2018–2019.
Currently working on
- Schemas of law and order — testing whether “law,” “rule” and “right” function as separate cognitive schemas, using European Social Survey data and the text of citizens’ complaints to government bodies. I am extending the same question to the Moral Machine Experiment data, and preparing an experiment of my own designed around it.
- Prosody and the structure of talk about crime — an automated pipeline for computational conversation-analytic transcription of calls about crime.
- Open-ended questions in silicon sampling surveys — with Daniil Lebedev and Sanzhar Kalkanbay, a factorial field experiment (Astana, N ≈ 1,000) testing whether open-ended items reduce the uniformity bias LLM-simulated respondents show on closed questions. The point is to get a sharper read on how models are biased when the subject is law, rules and order.
I am open to collaborations, fellowships and PhD positions.