About me

Hi! I am Alexandrina Vanke, a sociologist, researcher 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 Russia’s post-industrial cities.

I develop this research in my first single-authored book The urban life of workers in post-Soviet Russia: Engaging in everyday struggle published by Manchester University Press in January 2024.

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

My research interests include social theory, class, gender, everyday life, inequality, deindustrialisation and grassroots initiatives in urban space. I have more than 10 years of research experience. My expertise lies in qualitative methods of interdisciplinary social research, including interviews, participant observation, creative and sensory ethnographies, and innovative and arts-based approaches. I was trained to apply thematic, narrative, visual and discourse analysis. You can find my publications here.

In 2009, I graduated from the Sociological Department of the Lomonosov Moscow State University. In 2010, I obtained an MA degree 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 member of the British Sociological Association, the St. Petersburg Association of Sociologists, and the Working-Class Studies Association, and a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. I am also a member of the Editorial Board of Sociological Research Online journal.