Olga Zeveleva

Olga Zeveleva defended her PhD in sociology at the University of Cambridge (2019). In 2019, she joined the University of Helsinki as a postdoctoral researcher on the project “Gulag Echoes in the Multicultural Prison”, funded by the European Research Council.

Olga is a political sociologist focusing on systems of social control. She examines how states establish and maintain the rules people are governed by in their everyday lives, and how people respond such rules from the bottom up. Her doctoral work at the University of Cambridge investigated how journalists construct their civic, ethnic, and professional identities in a context of state crackdown on news media, focusing on the case of local Crimean journalists during Russia’s annexation of the peninsula. The results of her research have been published in The British Journal of Sociology, Current Sociology, The Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, The European Journal of Communication, and Nationalities Papers.

On the Gulag Echoes project at the University of Helsinki, she works on social control in the context of penal systems. She employs qualitative methods across multiple field sites to examine how ethnic, civic, and political self-identification form among prisoners in the penal systems of Eastern and Central Europe.