Dr Mariya Ivancheva

Personal statement

Mariya Ivancheva is an anthropologist and sociologist of higher education and labour. Her academic and research-driven advocacy work focus on the casualisation and digitalisation of academic labour, the re/production of intersectional inequalities at universities and high-skilled labour markets, and the role of academic and student communities in broader processes of social change especially in transitions to/from socialism. She is the author of multiple peer-reviewed and book chapters, op-ed and policy reports, and has recently published the monograph The Alternative University: Lessons from Bolivarian Venezuela (Stanford University Press, 2023). 

Mariya has carried out historically grounded and theoretically informed ethnographic fieldwork and interdisciplinary mixed-method research in different regions of the world, including Eastern and Western Europe, South America and Southern Africa. As an engaged scholar she has been a member of a number of research-led platforms, working on national, international and EU-level on topics of anti-racism, labour rights, gender and financial justice, e.g. LeftEast, LevFem, Essential Autonomous Struggles Transnational (E.A.S.T.) and PrecAnthro. As a member of her anti-perecarity work, she served on the board of the European Association of Social Anthropology, as a member (2019-21) and President (2021-23).

Beyond her academic work, Mariya is a qualified psychotherapist (PGDip Counselling and Therapy, Leeds Beckett University, 2023). In her work she integrates insights and techniques from psychodynamic (psychodrama, TA), humanistic, and cognitive-behavioural paradigms. She works with specific focus on mental health provision in education- and labour-related setting and is interested in issues around the link between collective and individual mental health and wellbeing, volunteer and activist 'free' labour and burn-out, and the effects of 'flexible' capitalist organisation on personal wellbeing and public mental health provision.

Mariya has a large experience in undergraduate and postgraduate research & teaching supervision, through traditional MA & PhD routes, as well as professional doctorates and practitioner inquiry. She is happy to receive PhD / EdD inquiries on topics such as:
- Higher education, leadership and management
- Academic and teaching labour and industrial relations
- Digital education, outsourcing and automation
- Gender/race/class/intersectional inequalities and social justice in education
- Global historical and geopolitical topics in education incl. socialist and alternative university experiments

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