Authors

Marzia Balzani received her DPhil in social anthropology from Oxford University (UK) in 1998. She is Research Professor of Anthropology in the Division of Arts and Humanities at New York University Abu Dhabi. She teaches social and cultural anthropology and is completing an ethno-historical study of the Ahmadiyya community in the UK. She is also writing a textbook of social and cultural anthropology and conducting research on female genitalia cutting in Kenya as part of a multidisciplinary team. Additionally, she is currently researching gender, nation building, and identity through cuisine among Emirati women. She previously carried out fieldwork in Rajasthan, India, and published her ethnography on political ritual, Modern Indian Kingship: Tradition, Legitimacy and Power in Rajasthan (School of American Research Press, 2003), based on this research. She is the author of articles on a range of topics including gendered violence, masculinities, pilgrimage and ritual, dreams in Islam, transnational families, refugees and asylum, and pedagogy and curriculum design in the teaching and learning of social and cultural anthropology.

Piotr Filipkowski is a sociologist, oral historian, Associate Professor at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Sciences, and researcher at the University of Vienna. He is coordinator and participant in various oral history documentation and research projects and cofounder and collaborator of the Polish Oral History Archive run by the Karta Center and the History Meeting House in Warsaw. His PhD dissertation was based on analysis of biographical narrative interviews with concentration camps survivors and published as Historia mówiona i wojna: Doświadczenie obozu koncentracyjnego w perspektywie narracji biograficznych (Oral History and War: The Experience of the Concentration Camp in the Perspective of Biographical Narrative) by Wrocław University Press in 2010. He is currently publishing mainly on qualitative research methods and oral history theory.

Konstantin Glazkov is a doctoral student in the Department of Sociology at the National Research University–Higher School of Economics, with an MA in urban studies and planning. His research interests include mental maps, new media, and mobile games.

Varvara Kobyshcha is a doctoral student in the Department of Sociology and junior researcher at the Center for Fundamental Sociology (National Research University–Higher School of Economics, Moscow). In 2011 she received her MA in sociology from the Moscow School of Social and Economic Sciences/University of Manchester. Her dissertation project is devoted to the mutual constitution of discourse and materiality in the process of meaning making; the empirical basis for this project is an ethnographic study of folk art production. She has also participated in a number of research projects in the spheres of culture, urban space, and urban communities.

Jeremy Morris received his DPhil in Russian studies from the University of Sussex in 2003. He holds a joint faculty appointment as Associate Professor in the Centre for Russian, European, and Eurasian Studies (CREES) and the School of Languages and Cultures at the University of Birmingham. His research similarly straddles disciplines, particularly critical political economy and anthropology, and is focused on understanding “actually lived experience” in Russia and other postsocialist states, particularly in relation to work, class, and the diverse economy. He has authored a number of books and articles including Everyday Postsocialism: Working-Class Life Strategies in the Russian Margins (Palgrave, forthcoming). He is the coeditor of The Informal Postsocialist Economy: Embedded Practices and Livelihoods (Routledge, 2014) and Informal Economies in Post-Socialist Spaces: Practices, Institutions and Networks (Palgrave, 2015).

Agnieszka Pasieka holds an MA in sociology (2007) from the Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Poland, and a PhD in social anthropology (2012) from Martin Luther University in Halle, Germany. Her first book, Hierarchy and Pluralism: Living Religious Difference in Catholic Poland (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), discusses the situation of religious and ethnic minorities in the context of church-state relations in Poland. Currently she is a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Research Fellow at the University of Vienna’s Institute for East European History, where she is conducting the research project “Transnational Nationalism: Far-Right Nationalist Groups in East Central Europe in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries.” Her research interests include the anthropology of religion, ethnicity and nationalism, politics, migration, and social history.

Ekaterina Pavlenko is a sociologist and researcher with an MA in sociology from the National Research University–Higher School of Economics (2012) and an MA in political science from the joint program of the Moscow School for Social and Economic Sciences and the University of Manchester (2011). She is a junior research assistant at the Center for Cultural Sociology and Anthropology of Education at the Institute of Education, National Research University–Higher School of Economics on the longitudinal project “Trajectories in Education and Career” under the supervision of Dmitrii Kurakin. Her research interests are cultural sociology, anthropology, cultural pragmatics, and youth studies.

Ivan Pavlyutkin holds a Candidate of Sciences degree in sociology and at the present time is Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Social Sciences, National Research University–Higher School of Economics (HSE). He is also one of the leaders of the HSE summer sociological expeditions and a member of the scientific seminar “Sociology of Religion” at Saint Tikhon’s Orthodox University, Moscow. He is currently involved in research on the debt economy, lifestyle, large families, local and religious communities, and organizational changes in universities. His research interests are sociology and anthropology of the gift and duty, the university and the community, relational sociology, sociology of the family and children, and the effects of religiosity.

Polina Vrublevskaya has bachelor’s degree in sociology from the National Research University–Higher School of Economics (2013). In 2015 she received her master’s degree in sociology from the Moscow School of Social and Economic Sciences (joint program affiliated with the University of Manchester and Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration). She is employed at Saint Tikhon’s Orthodox University (Moscow) as a research fellow in the Sociology of Religion Laboratory and an instructor in the Department of Social Sciences. Currently she is involved in the international research project “Young Adults and Religion in a Global Perspective” based at Abo Academi, Finland. The scope of her research interests covers Durkheimian sociology, the sociology of morality, and community studies.

Greg Yudin is Senior Researcher at the Laboratory for Studies in Economic Sociology and Social Research, National Research University–Higher School of Economics. He teaches social theory in the School of Economics and Moscow School of Social and Economic Sciences. He is currently a doctoral student at the New School for Social Research (New York). He is the author of publications on economic sociology, social and political theory, and the philosophy of science. At present, he is examining the formation of solidarity and political mobilization in Russia.