About me

Hi! I am Alexandrina Vanke, a sociologist and author.

I hold a PhD in Sociology from the University of Manchester (2021). My doctoral thesis looked at the lived experiences of working-class communities in the major post-industrial cities of Russia.

This research underlies my first book The urban life of workers in post-Soviet Russia: Engaging in everyday struggle (Manchester University Press, 2024).

I am currently holding the position of a Senior  Research Fellow at the Federal Centre of Theoretical and Applied Sociology of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow. I am also a Research Associate on the project Deindustrialization and the Politics of Our Time at Concordia University, Montreal.

My research interests spans from social theory, class and inequality to everyday life, deindustrialisation, environmentalism and grassroots initiatives in urban space.

My expertise lies in qualitative methods of interdisciplinary social research, including interviews, participant observation, creative and sensory ethnographies, and innovative and arts-based approaches.

My article ‘Researching lay perception of inequality through images of society’ won the Sociology Sage Prize for Innovation and Excellence 2025 for the best article published in Sociology journal in 2024. Please find my other publications here.

In 2009, I graduated from the Sociological Department of the Lomonosov Moscow State University. In 2010, I obtained an MA degree in Sociology from the Department of Political Sciences and Sociology of the European University at St. Petersburg. In 2013, I defended my Candidate’s thesis entitled Semantics of the Masculine Body in the Space of Social Distinctions at the Institute of Sociology of the Russian Academy of Sciences and earned the degree of Candidate of Sciences in Sociology.

I am a course leader of Avant-Garde and Arts-Based Methods in Qualitative Research (Manchester, UK), which I co-designed with contemporary artist Victoria Lomasko within the National Centre for Research Methods training. Earlier I taught courses Discourse Analysis in Sociology, Qualitative Data Analysis, Sociology of Collective Actions, Sociology of the Body and Sociology of Mass Communication at different Universities of Moscow, Russia. I am a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, UK.

I serve on the Editorial Boards of Sociology (2025-2028) and Sociological Research Online (2023-2026). I am also a member of the British Sociological Association, the British Association for Slavonic and Eastern European Studies, and the St. Petersburg Association of Sociologists.

My e-mail address: alexandrina.vanke(at)gmail.com.