Mariia
Chetverikova

Knowledge Production under Geopolitical Disruption

Reconfiguring the Field of Slavic, East European & Eurasian Studies after 2022

How do academic fields respond to geopolitical crisis? This project traces the reconfiguration of Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (SEEES) in U.S. academia following Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine. Drawing on interviews with displaced and U.S.-based scholars, fieldwork at ASEEES conferences, and archival analysis, it uses Strategic Action Field theory to show how institutions, networks, and researchers renegotiate legitimacy, expertise, and disciplinary purpose under political rupture.

Contributes tothe sociology of knowledge, organizational sociology, postcolonial thought, and the sociology of intellectuals and migration.

The Double Bind of a Field in Crisis

How U.S. Slavic Studies has — and hasn't — reorganized since 2022

Drawing on 41 interviews with scholars across the field, this paper from my dissertation shows how Russia's 2022 invasion destabilized an epistemic hierarchy long anchored in Russian institutional prestige, opening space for decolonial approaches — yet why change has been so uneven. Departments are caught in a double bind: an administrative demand for the Russian-centered courses that reliably enroll, and a scholarly demand to de-center Russian, made inescapable by the contraction of the humanities. They manage it by decoupling structure from practice in two opposite directions — adopting the visible forms of change while teaching reproduces the old order, or preserving familiar titles while quietly transforming what is taught inside them.

Contributionbridges the sociology of knowledge and organizational theory, extending decoupling theory to organizations bound to two audiences at once.

Mental Health Crisis Response in Chicago

Community-based research with the Collaborative for Community Wellness

A collaborative study with the UIC Community Research Collective, supported by the UIC Institute for Research on Race and Public Policy, culminating in the report We Gotta Stop Criminalizin' Mental Illness (2024). With a team of ten, I interviewed Chicago residents about their experiences with crisis response — finding that decades of disinvestment have left police as default first responders, a role that often escalates and criminalizes people in crisis. Residents also articulated visions for dignified, voluntary, non-police alternatives.

Rethinking the Concept of Agency

Chicagoans who faced mental health crisis-response institutions

Growing out of the Chicago study, this paper rethinks agency through the lens of dehumanization studies — Disability, Postcolonial, and Mad Studies. Based on interviews with people who faced crisis-response institutions, it develops an interactional model of agency: a capacity to control one's actions that is unevenly distributed by race, gender, immigration status, and other structural positions, and that can be stripped or defended in moments of institutional power.

Digital Archiving of Soviet Political Repression

A searchable database of 100,000+ repressed individuals

For seven years I worked at International Memorial, the society awarded the 2022 Nobel Peace Prize, researching political repression in the USSR. Rather than simply digitizing documents, our team built a searchable database that reconstructs the social networks of repression: each record links a person to co-defendants, fellow inmates, and members of the same underground group. Retrievals that once took weeks in a traditional archive now take seconds.

Why it mattersthe network structure makes patterns of persecution — and of solidarity — legible across cases in ways conventional archives rarely allow.

Agency in Gulag Investigation Files

Hans Koschnick Scholarship for Researchers at Risk

Reading Gulag investigation files "against the grain," this project asks how prisoners inscribed agency into documents designed to erase it. Some refused to sign interrogation protocols or annotated their signatures with protests; others petitioned Soviet leaders to overturn false accusations; officers' irregular reports even recorded moments of open defiance. Together these traces show how rigid bureaucratic forms could be appropriated to register dissent and self-assertion.

Argumenteven uniform state documentation preserves fragmented but vital traces of resistance and alternative understandings of justice.

Institutions & Networks in Soviet Literature

The "backstage" of late-Soviet publishing, 1960s–80s

A two-year research assistantship examining how social networks and institutions interacted in the late-Soviet literary field. Through biographical interviews and egodocuments, the project reconstructs the informal "backstage" of publishing — the private negotiations that structured the field as decisively as censorship bodies did, yet were later forgotten under a myth that "everyone understood everything." The work produced two co-authored articles in New Literary Observer (2022).

Private Tutors in Russia's Shadow Education

Identity, networks, and the making of a non-institutional profession

My BA and MA research examined private tutors — a profession without clear legal or symbolic status. Combining interviews, observation of online communities, and recorded sessions, I traced how tutors build multi-faceted identities that move strategically across networks (BA, 2020), and how the COVID-19 pandemic fragmented and accelerated tutoring into a distinct, non-institutional profession (MA, 2022).

Broader pointshadow education is a window onto the informal logics that emerge wherever formal systems impose constraints.