Dr Anna Shadrina

Leverhulme Early Career Fellow

SSEES

UCL SLASH

Joined UCL: 8th Jan 2018

Research summary

I am a sociologist with particular interest in gender, ageing and social class, and migration in post-Soviet contexts and beyond. My research projects to date have explored socio-political transformations in Russia, Belarus and Ukraine since the demise of the USSR and how these transformations affected individuals' personal lives.

My two monographs (Shadrina 2014, 2017), both written for a wide audience and published in Russian by Novoe Literaturnoe Obostenie, were the first studies to explore the transformation of conventional heterosexual family life in Russia, Belarus and Ukraine. The first monograph showed how official state discourses of 'protecting traditional family values' have failed to address the existing diversity of intimate relationships in these countries. The second book examined women's reproductive choices in the context of post-Soviet welfare cuts and the establishment of the capitalist job market. My Ph.D. examined Russian women's experiences of ageing after Soviet socialism in Russia and the UK, and how these experiences were conditioned by the new systems of social inequality.

Currently, I am conducting full-time research, funded by a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellowship. My new project explores the social and political production of ageing in Belarus and Ukraine during the covid-19 pandemic. It assesses the impact of state policies in response to the pandemic on the social inclusion of people aged 60 and over in two bordering countries with different political and welfare systems. Exploring the case of the coronavirus, my research seeks to understand whether there is a solution between a paternalist and a neglectful approach to ageing that would offer a more inclusive position for older people in society.

Teaching summary

2022/23 SEES0117 - Political Sociology (MA)

2021/22 SEES0117 - Political Sociology (MA)

2020/21 SESS0014 - Understanding Society: Introduction to Political Sociology (BA)

2017/18 SESS0017 - Understanding Politics II: How Politics Works (BA)

Biography

I started my career in journalism in Belarus. Since 2005, when I started an MA course in gender studies at the European Humanities University (Vilnius, Lithuania), my writings have predominantly focused on the problem of gender and other cleavages of social inequality. In 2014-15, I tough journalism at the European Humanities University. In 2014, I was awarded an Open Institute Civil Society Scholar Award grant to pursue a research visit in the Weeks Centre for Social and Policy Research at London South Bank University. In 2015, I moved to London to pursue my Ph.D. at Birkbeck College. In 2017, I was awarded a Civil Society Scholar Award a second time, to work at the Institute for Public Knowledge at New York University as a Visiting Fellow. In the same year, my second book received the 'Libmissiya' Book Prize as the most successful book of the year that addresses topical political and socio-economic issues of contemporary Russia in an accessible way. In 2019, I was awarded a six-month Birkbeck Wellcome Trust Postdoctoral Fellowship for revising my dissertation for publication. In 2021, I took up a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship at SSEES.

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