Anya (she/they) is a researcher of digital technologies as a part of memory and imagination. She received her education at the Higher School of Economics (BA in Cultural Studies) and the University of Maastricht (MSc in Cultures of Art, Science and Technology). She is based in Berlin, Germany.
Between 2018 and 2022 Anya has been one of the four coordinators of The club for internet and society enthusiasts. The club is an independent, non-profit, and grassroots organization that is meant to create space for Russian-speaking internet researchers, activists and artists to meet, talk and collaborate. The club conducted research projects in cooperation with universities and companies and created educational materials and projects related to Internet Studies.
http://clubforinternet.net/en/conferences/
<aside> ◽ Internet Beyond was an annual conference organized by The club between 2016 and 2021. The conference was a platform for discussions among media, internet, and digital culture researchers, along with other qualitative scholars. Being a grassroots initiative, each year Internet Beyond was experimenting with formats of presentation trying to escape the institutionalized tradition of monologue presentation implying ownership and narrative-centrism of acquired knowledge. Conference supported discussion, critique, doubts, revisions, and collective sense-making, while having in mind academic standards of knowledge production. The conference hosted multiple international researchers as keynotes and collaborators, e.g. Adi Kuntsman, Annette Markham, Katrin Tiidenberg and others.
In 2019, along with live events, Internet Beyond had an online blog, where scholars were reflecting and commenting on the status of the internet as a “global” network.
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<aside> ◽ In 2018 Anya, together with Dr. Adi Kuntsman and Dr. Anna Paukova designed and tutored an online course about “digital disengagement” — a paradigm that people have a right and need to opt-out of usage of digital technologies, or minimize this usage. The course included the curation of a small group of students, working on their own research projects and open online study materials, including interviews with international media refusal researchers. One of the results of the school has been interview-based research on digital disengagement among Russian IT professionals.
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illustration by Alisa Rangaeva