Postdoctoral Fellows and Visiting Professors

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Alla Konnikov

konnikov@ualberta.ca

Post-Doctoral Fellow

Alla joined the U of A to work in BIAS project - Responsible AI for Labour Market Equality, a collaborative study between computing statisticians and social scientists in Canada and the UK that explores the role of artificial intelligence (AI) in shaping gender and ethnic bias in labour market areas. She will be working with Karen Hughes and Nicole Dernier to bring a sociological perspective to the multidisciplinary team. Alla recently received her PhD from the University of Calgary, and her dissertation explored the intersectional mechanism of gender, immigration and visible minority statuses in shaping career trajectories of engineers in Canada. Her research interests are located within the bridged perspectives of gender relations at work and international skilled migration with special focus on immigrants’ skills transferability in professional markets and women's careers in male-dominated fields. Her research agenda is informed by the intersectionality approach and focuses on the ways different forms of disadvantage converge in shaping the structure of opportunities for career attainment. 

 

Olga Plakhotnik

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Dr. Olga Plakhotnik (she/ they) is the Bayduza Postdoctoral Research Fellows at the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, co-hosted by the Department of Sociology under the mentorship of Shirley Anne Tate. Olga is a qualitative researcher working at the intersection of queer feminist frameworks and decolonial perspectives in Eastern Europe. Her areas of research interests include social science epistemologies, critical citizenship studies, feminist and queer pedagogies, and contemporary feminist, LGBT, and queer activisms. Also, Olga is joint editor-in-chief of Feminist Critique: East European Journal of Feminist and Queer Studies.



Rafico Ruiz is a SSHRC Banting Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Sociology at the University of Alberta. In the winter of 2018, he will be the Fulbright Chair in Arctic Studies at Dartmouth College. Heholds a Ph.D. in Communication Studies and the History & Theory of Architecture from McGill University. He studies the relationships between mediation and social space, particularly in the Arctic and Subarctic; the cultural geographies of natural resource engagements; and the philosophical and political stakes of infrastructural and ecological systems. His work appears in a number of journals and edited collections, including the International Journal of Communication, the Journal of Northern Studies, Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies, and Communication +1. His work has been supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Smallwood Foundation, Media@McGill, the McCord Museum and Archives, and the Harvard Medical School, amongst others.
Rafico Ruiz is a SSHRC Banting Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Sociology at the University of Alberta. In the winter of 2018, he will be the Fulbright Chair in Arctic Studies at Dartmouth College. Heholds a Ph.D. in Communication Studies and the History & Theory of Architecture from McGill University. He studies the relationships between mediation and social space, particularly in the Arctic and Subarctic; the cultural geographies of natural resource engagements; and the philosophical and political stakes of infrastructural and ecological systems. His work appears in a number of journals and edited collections, including the International Journal of Communication, the Journal of Northern Studies, Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies, and Communication +1. His work has been supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Smallwood Foundation, Media@McGill, the McCord Museum and Archives, and the Harvard Medical School, amongst others.