Claudia Eggart is an Associate Professor at the Institute of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Warsaw. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Manchester, and holds research positions at the Centre for East European and International Studies (ZOiS, Berlin), and the Leibniz Zentrum Moderner Orient (ZMO, Berlin). Her research traces how everyday economies, infrastructure, and emotion intersect in lived experiences of geopolitics—from border and customs regimes to market mobilities and logistical life. In her work, Claudia explores the history and the volumetric social live of spatial metaphors such as containers, hubs, nodes, corridors and chokepoints to develop a grounded understanding of how shifting global orders materialize in everyday life. Her work has been published in the Europe-Asia Studies Journal, Third World Quarterly, Geopolitics, Communist and Post-Communist Studies, and in Anthropological Theory.
At the Aleksanteri Institute, Claudia will complete her monograph, Lived Geopolitics: Re-scaling Market Infrastructures from Soviet Collapse to Backlash Imperialism. The book asks how geopolitics is lived, negotiated, and enacted beyond the state. Rather than focusing on governments and great-power competition, it examines the everyday practices of cross-border traders at two historically connected yet distinct post-Soviet retail hubs: the 7Km Market in Odesa, Ukraine, and Dordoi Bazaar in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan.
Drawing on more than 18 months of multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2018 and 2026, the project develops the concept of lived geopolitics, a bottom-up framework that foregrounds traders as knowledgeable economic actors who actively navigate and shape geopolitical change. By tracing the transformation of these marketplaces from the collapse of the Soviet Union to the present, the book offers a longitudinal account of post-Soviet marketization and shows how traders continually adapt to economic crises, war, and shifting regulatory environments. The book also compares the trajectories of the 7Km Market and Dordoi Bazaar, bringing Eastern Europe and Central Asia into dialogue while challenging Russia-centered perspectives on the post-Soviet region by highlighting local agency.
During her fellowship, Claudia will complete the book's final chapter, which examines how the COVID-19 pandemic and Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine have accelerated the platformization of cross-border trade. Drawing on new ethnographic material, the chapter explores how traders increasingly rely on digital platforms such as Wildberries, Rozetka, TikTok, Instagram, and WhatsApp, and how these digital infrastructures are reshaping supply chains, creating new intermediaries, and transforming everyday experiences of geopolitics.
Time of the visit: mid-January - mid-March 2027
Kristen R. Ghodsee is the graduate chair and the Catherine Bryson Professor of Russian and East European Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, where she also serves as a member of the Graduate Groups in Anthropology and History. She is the author of twelve books and her articles and essays have been translated into over twenty-five languages, appearing in publications such as The Washington Post, The New York Times, Foreign Affairs, Jacobin, The New Republic, Le Monde Diplomatique, El Pais, and Die Tageszeitung. Her recent academic books include: Second World, Second Sex: Socialist Women's Activism and Global Solidarity during the Cold War (Duke University Press, 2019) [which she wrote as a FRIAS fellow in 2014-2015] and Taking Stock of the Shock: Social Impacts of the 1989 Revolutions (Oxford University Press, 2021). Her most recent trade book is Everyday Utopia: Better Ways of Living Equally (Vintage 2023).
Ghodsee has held other residential research fellowships at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey; the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University; the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington DC; the Imre Kertész Kolleg at the Friedrich-Schiller-Universität in Jena; the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research in Rostock; the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies (FRIAS); and the Center for History at Sciences Po in Paris. In 2012, Ghodsee was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship for her work in Anthropology and Cultural Studies. She is also an Aleksanteri Visiting Fellow alum, having previously held the fellowship in 2016.
In the 1990s, some 400 million people across Eastern Europe lived through an economic collapse deeper than the Great Depression. Shock therapy, implemented to a greater or lesser degree simultaneously across the region, creating chaos. Mass privatization depressed prices, Western investors easily outbid domestic buyers, and “restructuring” meant mass layoffs. With prices low, asset stripping and liquidations multiplied. One journalist called the process “the biggest, most hectic and most controversial going-out-of-business sale the industrialized world has seen.”
This rapid liquidation of state enterprises caused widespread unemployment just as prices rose and social safety nets disintegrated. During the first ten years of the transition from socialism to capitalism, 47 percent of the population of Eastern Europe and Eurasia fell below the established World Bank poverty line for this region: $5.50 per day. By 1999, roughly 191 million men, women, and children suffered severe material deprivation.
Yet while families lost jobs, pensions, and even years of life expectancy, Western institutions and commentators insisted things were “getting better.” My proposed book project calls that denial what it was: collective gaslighting. By massaging statistics, celebrating televisions and cars, and blaming cultural “deficiencies,” experts erased the trauma of entire societies. To remember the transition only as a story of liberation and modernization is to erase the lives upended in the process. Only by facing that past, without euphemism or erasure can we begin to understand the region’s present and perhaps imagine a more just future.
Time of the visit: mid-May - June 2027
Paul Goode is Professor and McMillan Chair in Russian Studies in the Institute for European, Russian & Eurasian Studies at Carleton University (Canada). His research focuses on nationalism, authoritarianism, and propaganda in Russia for the former Soviet Union, and he has published in a variety of journals including Perspectives on Politics, Post-Soviet Affairs, Nationalities Papers, Nations and Nationalism, and Social Science Quarterly. He is Editor-in-Chief of Communist and Post-Communist Studies and currently serves on the Board of Directors of the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES) and the Advisory Board for the Association for the Study of Nationalities (ASN).
This project focuses on the ways that Russian state propaganda capitalizes on political emigration domestically, and how it affects receiving countries’ perceptions of Russian émigrés. Russian state media and its proxies target domestic audiences as well as Russian emigre communities. In domestic propaganda, strategic narratives in the media aim to legitimate the ongoing invasion of Ukraine, to keep the Russian public de-mobilized, and to isolate any political opposition. When targeting foreign populations, state media narratives additionally seek to co-opt, divide, and polarize society by spreading misinformation, conspiracy theories, and undermining trust in democratic institutions. Post-communist countries are particularly vulnerable to this form of disinformation given their lower trust in media. Russians who fled the country since 2022 are pivotal for assessing the effectiveness of state propaganda in targeting both domestic and foreign audiences, particularly as war-induced migrants have been active in volunteer work and civic education projects.
This project examines Russia’s strategic narratives concerning its war with Ukraine in Russia’s domestic media and how Russia’s strategic narratives target Russian migrants in neighboring post-Soviet states and in the West. Of particular interest are the ways that Russian political emigres consume Russia’s strategic narratives (whether by way of Russia’s domestic media, recirculation via social media, or penetration of host countries’ media environments), and whether they perceive these as credible. An important potential political remittance provided by political émigrés is inoculating people in their home country against authoritarian propaganda, so the project also examines whether they seek to engage with people in their networks in Russia about media narratives. The project further considers the effect of exposure to Russia’s media narratives on political émigrés’ assessments of the media and democratic institutions in their host countries.
Time of the visit: March-April 2027
Galina Miazhevich is an established academic at the School of Journalism, Media and Culture (JOMEC), Cardiff University, UK. Galina’s research focuses on media, culture, and identity in post-communist Europe. Before joining Cardiff, Galina held academic positions at the Universities of Manchester and Leicester and was Gorbachev Media Research Fellow at the University of Oxford. Galina has published widely on media, democracy and misinformation; multicultural, religious and gender identities; geopolitics, nation-branding and popular culture. Galina has a sustained track record in securing competitive research funding, contributing to leading international journals, book series, and scholarly networks. Her recent research projects offer a conceptual framework on feminism in post-Soviet societies and a timely insight into the interconnections between gender, warfare and media environments. Galina held a Visiting Fellowship at Aleksanteri Institute, University of Helsinki (2017) and was a Visiting Scholar at Davis Centre for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard University (2023).
This study addresses contradictory attitudes toward gender equality and feminism in post-Soviet societies. Building on my concept of “post-Soviet postfeminism” (Miazhevich, 2025) and my work within the Academy of Finland-funded FEMCORUS project (2021–2025), this project explores grassroots understandings of feminism and gender equality in Ukraine, Russia, and Poland. At a time when anti-feminist narratives are gaining an increasing traction, the project provides a timely insight into how feminist politics are negotiated in societies shaped by profound political and social change, including the impact of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Using a mixed-methods approach that combines online surveys, interviews, and social media mapping, the study investigates how global feminist ideas are translated, adapted, or resisted in local contexts. The findings will contribute to a deeper understanding of contemporary feminism across the post-Soviet region. Preliminary data analysis will be completed before the visit. The time at Aleksanteri Institute will enable a concentrated writing-up time. Alongside my work on the article, I hope to discuss the issue and the data with the colleagues at Aleksanteri Institute. As the topic is highly contested, I want to ensure that I incorporate as much feedback as possible prior to a formal peer-review.
Time of the visit: May 2027
Svitlana Pavlenko is a historian specialising in Cold War intelligence, Soviet security institutions, the urban and local history of Dnipro (Ukraine), as well as Japanese–Ukrainian contacts. She is a Fellow at the Centre for Advanced Study Sofia (Bulgaria, 2025–2027). Svitlana previously served as Deputy Director of the Museum of Dnipro City History (Ukraine, 2020–2024) and was a Visiting Scholar at the University of Manitoba (Canada, 2022–2025). She received her PhD in World History from Oles Honchar Dnipro National University (Ukraine) in 2017. Her previous research examined Japanese consular networks and Soviet counterintelligence in Ukraine from the late nineteenth century to the 1930s. Her current work explores Soviet industrial espionage and scientific and technical intelligence in the Dnipropetrovsk region during the 1950s and 1960s, based on newly declassified archival materials from Ukrainian security archives.
Svitlana Pavlenko’s research project, Scientific-Technical Contacts as Channels of Espionage: KGB Industrial Intelligence in Dnipropetrovsk, 1950s–1960s, examines how scientific and technical exchange became channels for acquiring industrial and technological intelligence during the early Cold War, with particular attention to the Khrushchev Thaw. The project focuses on the Dnipropetrovsk region, one of the Soviet Union’s most important industrial and defence centres. Its administrative centre, Dnipropetrovsk (now Dnipro), gradually became a "closed city" because of its strategic role in missile production. Although the city was officially closed to foreigners in 1959, international contacts continued through industrial cooperation, professional exchanges, and overseas travel by Soviet specialists. Foreign industrial delegations regularly visited other industrial centres in the region.
Drawing on newly declassified archival materials from the Sectoral State Archive of the Security Service of Ukraine, the project explores how the KGB monitored these contacts while also exploiting them to acquire foreign technological knowledge. It examines the recruitment of specialists for intelligence-related missions abroad, selected cases of technological intelligence gathering, and the significance of temporary visits by foreign industrial delegations as opportunities for intelligence gathering. More broadly, the project investigates the relationship between intelligence, industrial modernisation, and knowledge circulation during the early Cold War.
During her visit to the Aleksanteri Institute, Pavlenko will analyse and systematise the archival materials already collected, conduct a comparative analysis of selected case studies and prepare a peer-reviewed journal article. She will also present her research at the Visiting Fellows Seminar, discuss the project with colleagues, and use the University of Helsinki’s library collections to strengthen its comparative and theoretical framework and identify new directions for future research.
Time of the visit: August - September 2026