Maxim Alyukov (PhD, University of Helsinki) is a political sociologist specialising in media and political communication in autocracies, with a particular focus on Russia. He is currently a Leverhulme Early Career Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Manchester. Before joining the University of Manchester, Maxim was a postdoctoral fellow at King’s Russia Institute at King’s College London, where he remains a research associate. Maxim’s research has been published in a variety of disciplinary and area studies journals, including Political Communication, Nature Human Behaviour, Politics, Qualitative Psychology, and Europe-Asia Studies. He is also a member of the Public Sociology Laboratory, a research group analysing politics and society in Russia and the post-Soviet region from a comparative perspective, and an affiliate of the International Panel on the Information Environment, an organisation dedicated to providing actionable scientific knowledge on threats to the global information landscape.
Maxim is currently working on the project Reflexive Propaganda: Authoritarian Political Communication in a Hybrid Information Environment at the University of Manchester, supported by the Leverhulme Trust. This project employs online experiments and computational analysis to examine how authoritarian propaganda adapts to today’s saturated media landscape by exploiting citizens' reflexivity and awareness of manipulation.
During the fellowship, Maxim will work on a study examining the effects of disinformation awareness in wartime Russia. References to disinformation have become a prominent aspect of modern political communication. While democratic governments strive to combat disinformation spread by authoritarian regimes, populist politicians have co-opted this discourse to discredit their opponents. This saturation of public debate with competing accusations of disinformation raises critical questions about its second-order effects — an area that remains underexplored. To address this gap, the study will focus on wartime Russia. Since the invasion of Ukraine, Putin’s government has made disinformation discourse a cornerstone of its propaganda strategy, while democratic governments have adopted similar rhetoric to counter authoritarian narratives, making Russia an ideal case study.
To address this, the study will focus on wartime Russia, drawing on data from an experiment embedded in the Panel Study of Russian Public Opinion and Attitudes, hosted by the University of Helsinki. It will argue that in highly saturated media environments, raising awareness of disinformation can paradoxically aid autocrats by reinforcing motivated reasoning. Politically engaged citizens, armed with additional cognitive resources, may dismiss belief-inconsistent information as disinformation, reinforcing pro-regime or anti-regime attitudes. The findings will contribute to research on authoritarian propaganda in digital media while offering policy insights relevant to countering disinformation in both authoritarian and democratic contexts.
Victoria Donovan is a Professor of Ukrainian and East European Studies and the Director of the Centre for Global Postsocialisms at the University of St Andrews. Her current research investigates entangled colonialisms and extractivist politics with a focus on Ukraine’s east. She is the author of Chronicles in Stone: Preservation, Patriotism, and Identity in Northwest Russia, published with NIUP imprint at Cornell in 2019; Limits of Collaboration: Art, Ethics, and Donbas, published by Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung in 2022; and Life in Spite of Everything: Tales from the Ukrainian East, published by Daunt Books Publishing in 2025. Her work has received grants and prizes, including a British Academy Rising Star Engagement Award, an AHRC/BBC New Generation Thinker award, and in 2023, in partnership with the Centre for Urban History in Lviv a European Heritage Award/EuropaNostra Award for Citizens’ Engagement and Awareness Raising.
As an Aleksanteri Fellow, I will pursue a project examining entangled colonialisms and histories of extraction with a focus on the Ukrainian east, also known as Donbas. The project will focus on the politics of this region’s visualisation, analysing how these shaped community identity and culture across time. Examining propaganda posters, films, and archival photography, I will explore how Donbas became flagship region of Soviet industrial modernity, and its labour force, the poster boys and girls of Stalinist hyperproductivity. Rather than focus exclusively on the ways that the region was imagined by outsiders, however, the project will foreground local actors and agents whose cultural practices and creative work offered alternative representations and imaginings of community life. Rooting its analysis in hitherto unstudied archives and collections, including corpuses of regional newspaper photography housed at local museums, factory film studio archives, work produced by amateur photography clubs, family albums and home video, this project will offer a radically different visual history of a region normally conceived only through the lenses of (de-)industrialisation and war. Challenging the ways that Ukraine’s east has been reduced in the global imagination to a set of exoticized and largely negative visual ideas, it will showcase the rich diversity of cultural, professional, and ecological life, as documented by those who resided in the region before its devastation by Russia’s war.
Tsvetelina Hristova is a media anthropologist and critical data studies scholar whose research offers critical analysis of the condition of labour and subjectivity in processes of datafication and automation of work and state governance and the development of AI. Her work has been published in the journals Big Data & Society, The International Journal of Communication, Journal of Cultural Economy, AI & Society: Knowledge, Culture and Communication; Work Organisation, Labour and Organisation, as well as in the book series Theory on Demand of the Institute of Network Cultures. She explores emerging forms of governance and control in labour migration, outsourcing and data practices through analysis of the intersections of different regimes of technological, political and cultural organising. She is a teaching fellow at the Department of Art Media and Technology, Southampton University and adjunct research fellow at the Institute for Culture and Society, Western Sydney University.
This project offers a contribution to debates about the alternative histories of computing, automation and AI. It looks at the case of the nation-wide project of digitalization of the economy in Socialist Bulgaria that took place from the mid-1960s. The focus of this project falls specifically on the Unified System of Environmental Protection developed in the 1980s, which offers the opportunity to revisit debates about the relationship between economic growth, technological innovation and industrialization and their detrimental impact on the environment. This paper takes as a methodological focus the example of failures and paths not taken in order to show how contemporary debates about the environmental impact of AI and the promise of technosolutionism can be evaluated from a Global East historical perspective.
The visiting fellowship at Aleksanteri Institute will be used for analysis of the archival material sourced from the Central State Archives in Sofia and drafting a publication.
Iuliia Korniichuk holds a PhD in Religious Studies from National Pedagogical Dragomanov University in Kyiv. She has over a decade of teaching experience in Ukrainian Culture, Religious Studies, and Religion and Politics at institutions such as the National Pedagogical Dragomanov University and the University of Warsaw. Dr. Korniichuk has been a visiting fellow at several renowned institutions, including the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna, Indiana University Bloomington, and the University of Munich. Her research has been published in journals such as Politics and Religion Journal, Religions, Eastern Journal of European Studies, and Stosunki Międzynarodowe – International Relations. Her academic interests include religion and politics, Eastern Orthodoxy, higher education, decolonisation, and Euro-integration.
This research project forms part of a broader study exploring the interaction between Orthodox Churches and European institutions. It will specifically examine the role of religion and religious rhetoric in disinformation campaigns aimed at undermining the European integration of Orthodox-majority countries, which, despite the widespread perception of a dichotomy, are increasingly declaring a pro-European orientation. Today, in addition to the four Orthodox-majority countries already within the EU, two-thirds of the current candidate countries also have an Orthodox majority.
The project will focus on three key aspects. First, it will analyse how religious themes are incorporated into disinformation campaigns, identifying the main narratives and their underlying mechanisms. Second, it will investigate how these campaigns adapt to various target audiences, considering regional, cultural, and political contexts. Finally, it will assess both the direct and indirect impact of such campaigns on public opinion and political discourse surrounding the EU integration of Orthodox-majority countries.
A qualitative methodology will be employed throughout the project to ensure an in-depth analysis of these complex dynamics.
Diana T Kudaibergen is a Lecturer in Central Asian Politics and Society at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies (SSEES) at the University College London. She is a political and cultural sociologist and a scholar of nationalist and dictatorial states. Kudaibergen is the author of The Kazakh Spring (Cambridge, 2024), Toward Nationalizing Regimes (Pittsburgh, 2020), Rewriting the Nation in Modern Kazakh Literature (Lexington, 2017) and the latest, What Does It Mean to be Kazakhstani (Hurst, 2025) and numerous articles about post-independent nation-building. Kudaibergen received her doctorate in sociology from the University of Cambridge where she also taught before joining UCL in 2024. At Aleksanteri Institute, Kudaibergen will focus on her ongoing research on regime-society relations in dictatorships.
Dr. Inna Melnykovska is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the Central European University, Vienna. She received a doctoral degree in Political Science from the Free University of Berlin and was a postdoctoral fellow at the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard University, held visiting positions at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and at the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto.
She specializes in International and Comparative Political Economy with an emphasis on the interaction of global, regional and domestic forces in the shaping of modern political regimes and economic systems in Eastern Europe and Eurasia. Her research has been published in Journal of Common Market Studies, Europe-Asia Studies, and Post-Soviet Affairs, among others.
She is an expert on business-government relations in Ukraine and is currently researching the adaptations and transformations of Ukrainian and EU companies catalyzed by the ongoing Russo-Ukrainian war and the new geopolitical context.
Professor Melnykovska will use her stay at the Aleksanteri Institute to work on her project, entitled “Refugee Entrepreneurship in the EU: Sparking Grass-roots Innovation, Civic Empowerment, and Transnational Connectivity” (RE-EMERGE). Focusing on Ukrainian forced migrants, the RE-EMERGE project examines refugee entrepreneurship as a tool for integrating forced migrants into host countries in the EU while empowering and/or maintaining their transnational economic and civic agency.
During her stay at the Aleksanteri Institute, Professor Melnykovska will work on a paper exploring dual agencies in civic engagement and business entrepreneurship among Ukrainian forced migrants. Based on semi-structured interviews conducted by Inna Melnykovska with Ukrainian (forced) migrant entrepreneurs in Germany and Austria, her study conceptualizes their civic goals and practices. Combining dual identities and activities, these entrepreneurs produce social entrepreneurship that goes beyond a livelihood pursuit and constitutes a form of civic activism across borders. Melnykovska's research explores the interactional effects between business and civic dimensions of refugee and migrant entrepreneurship, particularly the opportunities and constraints that civil activities provide for business activities, and vice versa. This empirical duality promises new insights for both business and civil society studies.
Sergii Pakhomenko, PhD, Associate Professor of Political Science and International Relations Department of Mariupol State University (relocated to Kyiv); Senior Researcher of the Faculty of Economics and Social Sciences of University of Latvia. His research interests include the politics of memory in Ukraine, Russia and the Baltic states, propaganda and information warfare.
His recent articles include Between History and Propaganda: Estonia and Latvia in Russian Historical Narratives; Securitization of Memory in the Pandemic Period: Case of Russia and Latvia; Politics of Memory in Latvia and Ukraine: Official Narratives and the Challenges of Counter-Memory. He elaborated the lecture course and coursebook «Historical Narratives in Propaganda».
Sergii Pakhomenko has been a visiting fellow at the Aleksanteri Institute of University of Helsinki, visiting fellow at the University of Tartu (Johan Skytte Institute of Political Studies), and academic coordinator from Mariupol State University of Erasmus+ project Rethinking Regional Studies: Baltic-Black Sea Relations.
Sergii Pakhomenko researches the politics of memory, the use of history for political purposes, information warfare, and in a broader context, in the struggle to preserve and strengthen (or on the contrary, destroy) national identity. The Russo-Ukrainian war triggered an intensification of the decommunisation and derusification processes of public, symbolic spaces and landscape of historical memory in Ukraine. Taken together, these processes increasingly correspond to decolonising political and media rhetoric and are legitimised in the relevant laws.
This research project explores applicability of postcolonial theory on the decolonial mnemopolitics in Ukraine. On the one hand, the decolonial discourse is particularly relevant in the context of the Russo-Ukrainian war, as it provides a deeper understanding of the historical roots of the conflict, its contemporary manifestations, and reflects the very existential nature of Ukrainian resistance to aggression. On the other hand, sharp media rhetoric that bear the mark of propaganda, radicalisation and securitisation of historical politics, and an emotionally charged ‘cancelling culture’ can create conditions for the dominance of ethno-national narratives in Ukraine.
Sergii Pakhomenko approaches the decolonial discourse in Ukraine from the perspective of post-colonial theory and securitization theory. He is exploring how decolonization, which is often framed within the so-called «defensive nationalism» (E. Thompson) corresponds with the discourse on mnemonic securitization, which implies “making certain historical remembrances secure by delegitimizing…or criminalizing others” (M. Mälksoo). He works on the following research questions: What arguments for decolonization policy are present in the Ukrainian postcolonial discourse? How decolonial policy are legally regulated and what symbols and cultural practices are subject to decolonisation? Who are the main narrators of postcolonial discourse and key actors of the securitization of mnemopolitics? How does Ukrainian historical counter-propaganda work and in what ways does it manifest itself? What do decommunisation and derussification look like in the regional context, what is the reaction of local communities in the South and East of Ukraine. At the Aleksanteri Institute, Sergii Pakhomenko will work on an academic article.
Olena Uvarova graduated from the Odesa I. I. Mechnikov National University in 2003 with an honors degree and obtained a PhD in World History in 2008. She is currently an Associate Professor at the Department of Social Sciences at Odesa National Medical University, Ukraine, where she teaches humanitarian courses and is the Chair of the student scientific group at her department. Many years of academic career her research was dedicated to the international relations in framework of Eastern question (18th-19th centuries). In parallel with this, in recent years, Dr. Uvarova has become interested in the issue of the evolution of medical education. Dr. Uvarova was the Visiting Fellow at the Aleksanteri Institute, University of Helsinki, Finland (August–September 2023), Virtual Fellow at the Linda Hall Library, Kansas, USA (15 July – 15 August 2024), Fellow at the New Europe College – Institute for Advanced Study, Bucharest, Romania (October 2024 – July 2025).
Dr. Uvarova’s visit in September 2025 is continuation of her previous visit in 2023, supported from the University of Helsinki funds donated to support Ukrainian scholars.
At the Aleksanteri Institute, Dr. Uvarova will develop her new research project devoted to the women's medical higher education in Ukrainian and Finnish lands at the second half of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th centuries. The primary purpose of the project is to explore, against the backdrop of the general progressive development of the education system in imperial times, the struggle of women in Ukrainian and Finnish lands for the opportunity to obtain a medical education, the admission of women to universities, as well as the circumstances of the emergence of special educational institutions and the learning process in them. The project utilizes the elements of comparative historical analysis to investigate the divergence and overlaps in the educational system of the Russian Empire in various territories subordinate to it. The actualization of the study is that it illustrate the retrospective of gender equality`s social trends in Ukraine and Finland. During her research stay, Dr. Uvarova will review literature on the topic of the project at the National Library of Finland (Slavonic Library), at the Helsinki University Library, analyze data at the University’s of Helsinki Archives and Registry for a follow-up publication, and communicate with colleagues at the University of Helsinki for exchanging ideas and views.
Dr Marina Yusupova is a Lecturer in Sociology at Edinburgh Napier University. She is a sociologist and gender scholar specialising in men and masculinities studies, feminist thought, decolonial theory, and epistemologies of knowledge production. She has a long-standing research interest in Russian masculinities and contemporary theories of gender, race and coloniality reflected in multiple journal outputs (e.g., Sociology; Gender, Work and Organization, Slavic Review; Nationalities Papers: The Journal of Nationalism and Ethnicity), book chapters, co-edited volumes, and outreach media publications. She has published on the paradoxes of militarised masculinities in contemporary Russia (2018); criminal articulations of masculinity in the narratives of non-criminal Russian men (2015); the legacy of European colonialism in post-Soviet Russian masculinities and scholarship about gender relations in Russia (2023). She has co-edited interdisciplinary volumes: Gender and Choice After Socialism (2018, Palgrave Macmillan) and Sexualities: Identities, Behaviors, and Society (2014, Oxford University Press).
Dr Yusupova’s current research agenda is situated within two fields: sociological research on global masculinities and interdisciplinary scholarship exploring the durability of empire and imperial violence in the contemporary world. The central question driving her work is how local and global imperial imaginaries and discourses produce present-day politics, identities, aspirations, and inequalities and how can masculinity help us understand the durability of empire. She explores these questions through the case of contemporary Russian masculinities and Russia’s ongoing imperialism, investigating how imperial imaginaries and discourses continue to operate in today’s world.
During her stay at the Aleksanteri Institute, Dr Yusupova will work on her book manuscript, Masculinity and Empire: The Case of Contemporary Russia. This book examines how ordinary Russian people use imperial discourses to narrate their life stories and negotiate their individual masculinities. She will also present her findings on the rise of anti-imperial discourse in Russia following the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. In the related talk she is going to deliver, she will discuss how global condemnation of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the resulting stigma of belonging to an ‘aggressor state’ shape Russian masculinities. Drawing on biographical interviews with Russian men in Russia, the UK, and those who relocated to European and Mediterranean countries after the war, it explores how they navigate this stigma. She will identify three stigma management strategies: ‘splitting and blaming,’ ‘disclaiming agency,’ and ‘turning to counter-discourses.’ Building on scholarship that theorises stigma as a form of power, she shows that stigmatisation and stigma management take place within the context of global coloniality where Russia is marked by imperial difference (a ‘second-rate’ empire) and inter-imperiality – an entanglement among empires through competition, collaboration, and conflict. By focusing on masculine subject positioning, she will reveal how participants’ imaginaries of masculinity are deeply intertwined with imaginaries of empire, theorising the nexus between masculinity and empire as a crucial site of making sense of this ongoing war.