My research focuses on issues of gender, youth, and citizenship in postsocialist Russia. My first book, Empowering Women in Russia: Aid, NGOs and Activism (Indiana University Press, 2007), traced the development encounter between Russian women’s groups and international aid agencies via an account of a participatory action research project with activists in provincial Tver’.

My most recent research – supported by the National Council for Eurasian and East European Research, IREX, and the National Science Foundation – has examined the controversial nationalist youth projects that proliferated in Russia in the Putin era (2005-2011). My second book, Youth Politics in Putin’s Russia: Producing Patriots and Entrepreneurs (Indiana University Press, 2015) examines some of these projects ethnographically, exploring both the forces that prompted them and the motivation of their participants.