Anna Schwenck
Anna Schwenck is a postdoctoral researcher in the Sociology Department of the Freie Universität Berlin’s Institute for East European Studies and will be a fellow at the University of Trento and the University of Basel in 2026. She is particularly interested in how cultural understandings, be they locally specific or transnationally salient, enable and restrain political legitimation.
Her recent monograph, Flexible Authoritarianism: Cultivating Ambition and Loyalty in Russia, is central to our symposium. For her novel research project, she investigates how under conditions of rising nationalism cultural consumption patterns are increasingly directed at gaining moral capital—alongside amassing cultural capital. The monograph was awarded with the ASA’s Mary Douglas Prize for the best book in the sociology of culture.