Profile

Professional career

• since 04/2022
  Lecturer at the Department of Political Theory and Democracy Research (Institute of Political Science, Leipzig University)
• since 10/2020
  PhD Candidate at the Institute for Political Science (Leipzig University)

Education

• 09/2018 - 07/2020
  M.A. Sociology, magna cum laude (St. Petersburg State University - Bielefeld University)
• 09/2014 - 07/2018
  B.A. Cultural Sciences, summa cum laude (Staatliche Universität St. Petersburg - Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg)

Panel Memberships

• since 02/2024
  Project member in the COST Action "CA22165 - Redressing Radical Polarisation: Strengthening European Civil Spheres facing Illiberal Digital Media (DepolarisingEU)"
• since 02/2022
  Doctoral fellow and a member of the editorial board at the Far-Right Analysis Network (FRAN)
• since 04/2021
  Member of the research group Mapping the Far-Right Truth Industry (MAFTI)

• Theories for researching radical right populism
• Theories for researching authoritarianism
• Discursive analysis of far-right actors
• Cultural Sociology (Civil Sphere Theory)
• Memory Studies (Collective memory and its narrative coding)

• Zavershinskaia, P.

  “Why Do We Need a World without Russia in It?” Discursive Justifications of the Russian Invasion of Ukraine in Russia and Germany

  Nationalism and ethnic politics. 2023. 29 (2). pp. 129–153.

  DOI: 10.1080/13537113.2023.2199927
  show details
• Zavershinskaia, P.

  Appropriating the civil sphere: the construction of German collective identity by right-wing populist actors during the Covid-19 pandemic

  American Journal of Cultural Sociology. 2023. pp. 1–27.

  DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/s41290-023-00189-2
  show details
• Zavershinskaia, P.

  Against the Civil Society’s Centre: Mimetic Crises by the German Populist Right

  In: Patterson, K. J.; Hidalgo-Tenorio, E. (Eds.)

  Multidisciplinary Approaches to the Discourses of Extremism. London: Taylor & Francis. 2024.

  ISBN: 978-1-04-005220-4
  show details
• Buarque, B.; Zavershinskaia, P.

  The far-right politics of ‘truth’: An exploratory analysis of the ‘truths’ produced by AfDKompakt and Patriotic Alternative

  In: Bruno, V. A. (Ed.)

  Populism and far-right trends in Europe. Milan: EDUCatt. 2022. pp. 25–48.

  ISBN: 978-88-9335-067-9
  show details

more publications

The main focuses of my teaching are:

• Qualitative analysis of collective memory
• Discursive analysis (including social narrative analysis) of multimodal socio-political texts
• Theories of populism and authoritarianism
• Comparative analysis of right-wing populism

• Civil society and authoritarianism

  This seminar explores different forms of authoritarianism and their influence on civil society worldwide. It examines the authoritarian attempts to appropriate civil society and the risks connected to this. It also investigates the extreme forms of such an appropriation expressed in the subsequent replacement of civil society with an imitation of civil society controlled by the authoritarian state. 

• Populism in the civil sphere

  This seminar attempts to provide answers to the populist symbolic influence in contemporary civil societies. It is devoted to discussing the previous theories of civil society and new uptakes of the Civil Sphere Theory. It also describes the analysis of the symbolic activity of the populist continuum from the political left to the right in civil society. 

• The populist Right and democracy

  This seminar is focused on studying the phenomenon of the populist right and its relationship to democracy. It covers various theoretical explanations of populism and considers the relationship between right-wing populism and democracy, including the contradictory relationship between the populist right and liberal democracy.

• Qualitative Analysis of National Memory

  The content of the seminar is focused on studying (1) theoretical explanations of the national memory; (2) textual and visual narrative analysis; (3) the Discourse-Historical Approach (DHA) to examining national memory narratives; and (4) ethnographic methodology aimed at decoding the symbolic meaning of artifacts (e.g., monuments, museums) of national memory.