Dr Kristina Pikovskaia
Job Title
Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellow
Room number
B0.8Building (Address)
16-19 George SquareCity (Address)
EdinburghPost code (Address)
EH8 9LDResearch interests
Research interests
Kristina's research interests include informal economies in Africa, urban livelihoods, women's economic empowerment, citizenship as a lived experience, ideas and practices of citizenship, political subjectivity, politics of the informal sector, the changing nature of work, state-society relations, and urban politics. She is especially interested in understanding how people experience major socio-economic and political transformations in their everyday economic lives.
Background
Kristina is the principal investigator on the Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship project Lived Citizenshipin the Informal Economy in Urban Zambia. She is mentored by Dr Sara Dorman.
Prior to joining the University of Edinburgh, Kristina completed her master's (2017) and doctorate (2021) in International Development at the University of Oxford. Her thesis ‘Vendors Keep This Economy Running’: Economic Informalisation and Citizenship in Harare, Zimbabwe looked at the impact of profound economic informalisation in Zimbabwe on people's ideas and practices of citizenship. Parts of this research are published in the Journal of Southern African Studies, Nations and Nationalism, and International Development Planning Review.
Her previous research included a study of narratives of Soviet military specialists and interpreters who provided assistance to Angola during the cold war.
Kristina is passionate about teaching and learning and has taught on the courses, such as History and Politics (Teaching Assistant, Oxford Department of International Development, 2018-2019), Politics in Sub-Saharan Africa (Tutor, St Anne's College, Oxford, 2021), Poverty and Human Development (Tutor, Wadham College, Oxford, 2022), Non-violent Resistance Movements (Tutor, Wadham College, Oxford, 2022), Politics and Theories of International Development (Guest Lecturer, Edinburgh, 2022), Africa in the Contemporary World (Guest Lecturer, Edinburgh, 2023), and Governance, Development, and Poverty in Africa (Guest Lecturer, Edinburgh, 2024). She also supervised postgraduate dissertations in International Development (Edinburgh).
She is the Associate Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (2023) and has a SEDA PDF(D1) award (2019).