Her research interests lie in the intersection of political geography, history of geographic thought, and territorial politics, with her current work examining the relations between land, territory, and power and their various manifestations in pre- and post-Soviet Russia.
Dr. Smirnova teaches courses in human geography, political geography and geopolitics, world geography and globalization, and most recently, politics of Russia and the former Soviet Union.
I am a human geographer with research interests at the intersection of political geography, history of geographic thought, urban and territorial politics. My work explores the relations between land and power and their various manifestations in pre-and post-Soviet Russia. In particular, I am interested in understanding how rights to land ownership and other modes of the appropriation of space are enacted, negotiated, and performed through formal and informal technologies of power.
This topic taps into two wider debates around spatial configurations of modern politics - on private property and on territory at large. Recently, I have examined private property regimes by looking at multiple practices of land ownership in Russia that often draw on both, post-Soviet 'unrule' of law and a long history of collectivist land management. While my current work on the evolution of the conception of territory involved the study of the history of Russian geographic thought and its political interventions.
Research:
- Territory And Russian Political Geographic Thought
- Land And Post-socialist Property Regimes
- Urban Politics And National Priority Projects
My work falls at the intersection of political geography, urban and territorial politics and explores relations between land and power and their various manifestations in pre-and post-Soviet Russia.
In particular, I conduct research on Russian land privatization reforms, as well as conceptions of territorial integrity in Russian political and geographic thought and their contemporary geopolitical implications.
Her work draws on a wide network of collaborations that she maintains with colleagues and institutions across Central and Eastern Europe.
Research:
- Political geography, territorial integrity, private property regimes, urban governance, Russia and post-socialist regions.
