DePOT is pleased to welcome three new research affiliates in March 2023. Read their profiles below and learn more about their work by navigating to their profile pages.

Alexandrina Vanke is a researcher holding a PhD in Sociology from the University of Manchester. Her expertise lies in the areas of deindustrialization, the lived experiences of working-class people, grassroots modifications of urban space and changes in postsocialist cities. In her forthcoming book ‘The urban life of workers in post-Soviet Russia: Engaging in everyday struggle’ (Manchester University Press), she provides a novel theoretical account of everyday life in post-indutrial cities. Her ethnographic research develops the concept of structure of feeling by Raymond Williams and the concept of habitus by Pierre Bourdieu in regard to everyday life, inequality and mundane resistance in deindustrializing urban spaces.

Alexandrina is currently holding the position of a Research Fellow at the Institute of Sociology of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow. She is also a member of the British Sociological Association and the St. Petersburg Association of Sociologists.

Andreas Fasel works part-time in the hospitality sector and as an independent historian. He holds a PhD in History from the University of Zurich. His research interests covers the history of working-class militancy against taylorization, the history of corporate social policy, and the history of both industrial and domestic work. In 2021 he published the book “Fabrikgesellschaft” (Factory as Society) which critically explores the inner workings of some of the most important Swiss industrial engineering/manufacturing firms after World War II. His current research focuses on the micro-politics of deindustrialization in Switzerand since the 1970s.

Leo Grob is a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of History, University of Bern. His research interests cover the history of labor management and labor and working-class history, the history of the Swiss domestic secret service, and the history of revolutionary utopias.

He holds a Sociology degree from the University of Zurich, a master’s degree in History from the University of Bern and has recently completed a PhD in History at the University of Bern. In his doctoral thesis, Leo explored the history of the Swiss aluminum company Alusuisse in Australia, Italy and Switzerland. Taking Alusuisse as a case study, his study sheds light on new forms of labor management practices and the shifting balance of power between labor and capital in the era of deindustrialization.

His current research focuses on the history of deindustrialization in Switzerland and on the history of radical imaginations since the Paris commune.