Olga Pinchuk

Postdoctoral Researcher (SNSF), PhD in Sociology (HSE University)

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 olga.pinchuk@unifr.ch
 +41 26 300 7759
 https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6403-9671

Research on contemporary Russian society and patterns of social change in the context of major political and economic transformations. Analysis of how different social groups navigate uncertainty, restructure everyday practices, and develop or limit forms of solidarity. Work on labor, the workplace, and ethnographic methods, particularly participant observation, with a focus on labor-related solidarities, collective practices, and changing boundaries of social support in late Soviet and post-Soviet Russia.

Postdoc SNSF
Department of European Studies and Slavic Studies

+41 26 300 7759

Biography

Olga Pinchuk joined the University of Fribourg in January 2026 as a Postdoctoral Researcher funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) at the Department of European Studies and Slavonic Studies. She holds a PhD in Sociology from the Higher School of Economics (HSE University), Moscow, where she defended her dissertation in 2025.

Her current research examines contemporary Russian society and patterns of social change in the context of major political and economic transformations. In particular, she studies how different social groups navigate uncertainty, restructure everyday practices, and develop or limit forms of solidarity under changing institutional conditions. Within this broader agenda, she focuses on collective practices and shifting boundaries of social support, paying particular attention to labor-related solidarities and forms of collective engagement.

More generally, Olga Pinchuk is a sociologist and ethnographer whose research focuses on labor, the workplace, and qualitative methodology, with attention to participant observation and ethnographic knowledge production. Her work is grounded in long-term immersive fieldwork and archival research, with a particular focus on industrial labor and working conditions in late Soviet and post-Soviet Russia. She has conducted extensive ethnographic fieldwork in factories, including a year-long study as a manual worker in a confectionery factory near Moscow, which resulted in an ethnographic monograph Failures and Breakdowns: An Ethnographic Study of Factory Workers’ Labor (2021, in Russian).

Beyond individual research, Olga Pinchuk has been involved in collaborative projects on labor, temporality, and social change in Soviet and post-Soviet societies, supported by funding from institutions including the Volkswagen Foundation, the Heinrich Böll Foundation, and the Alameda Institute.

Research and publications