About
Dr Anna Shadrina is Lecturer in Sociology in the Department of Sociology, Social Policy, and Criminology. Her interdisciplinary research spans Sociology, Gender Studies, Psychosocial Studies, and Critical Gerontology. She investigates the interplay between ageing and politics, focusing on themes such as authoritarianism, anti-authoritarian resistance, nationalism, and populism. Her most recent research projects examine how political actors use the categories of ageing and old age to demarcate the European East/West divide. Dr Shadrina’s research interests include non-Western epistemologies, especially in the post-communist societies of Eastern Europe.
Prior to joining the University of Liverpool in 2024, Dr Anna Shadrina was a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies (SSEES) from 2021 to 2024. She has taught a variety of topics in Sociology, Media Studies, Gender Studies, and Politics at the European Humanities University (Lithuania), Birkbeck, and UCL (UK). Dr Shadrina earned her BA in Journalism from Belarusian State University, and her MA in Sociology from the European Humanities University. She completed her PhD in Sociology at Birkbeck College, University of London. She is a Fellow of the UK Higher Education Academy.
Dr Shadrina began her career as a journalist in Belarus. Her intellectual journey was sparked by a question: how did the economic shock and the tectonic shift in social norms following the collapse of Soviet socialism affect people’s personal lives in Belarus, Ukraine, and Russia? To explore this, she wrote two books examining the transformation of women's matrimonial and reproductive choices in Eastern Europe. Her forthcoming book, 'The Babushka Phenomenon: Older Women and the Political Sociology of Ageing in Russia' (UCL Press), investigates how individuals navigate the experience of growing older amidst neoliberal capitalism, neo-conservatism, and neo-colonial violence.
She is open to working on or supervising projects that broadly explore:
• Social and political inclusion/exclusion in later life.
• Feminist cultures and ageing.
• East/West European divide, non-Western epistemologies, post-socialism, non-imperial futures.
• Authoritarianism, populism, nationalism and anti-authoritarian resistance.