dr Mariana Peixoto Irby

m.irby
@uw.edu.pl

Dr. Mariana Peixoto Irby is a sociocultural anthropologist whose research explores citizenship, borders, and the politics of difference in Russia and Central Asia. Drawing from 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Russia and Tajikistan, her doctoral dissertation focused on Tajik labor migration to and from Russia as a lens to explore race, ethno-nationalism, and postcoloniality in the former USSR. Alongside this research, she also engaged in activist-led projects with Central Asian migrant communities in Saint Petersburg, Russia.

At the Centre for Migration Research, Mariana is conducting research on outmigration from the Russian Federation in the wake of the war in Ukraine as part of the Democracy in Exile project. She is interested in how the presence of new Russian migrant communities, particularly in the Caucasus and Central Asia, has been shaping the migration policies and broader political dynamics of the region, as well as in situating these contemporary migratory patterns within broader histories of settler colonialism and political exile in Russia’s imperial peripheries.