Dr Maria Dubrova

I am a political and cultural geographer focusing on feminist and queer geopolitics and the study of more-than-human worlds. My research takes an interdisciplinary approach to the study of the former Soviet Union and contemporary Eastern Europe. 

I am a Research Fellow with the ESRC's UK in a Changing Europe (2022-2025), completing a project entitled 'Debordering Europe through the 2022 Ukrainian Refugee Crisis: Analysis of Responses in the UK, Poland and Romania'. Drawing on extensive fieldwork with displaced people, community leaders, and policymakers, the project examines how people in different communities mobilised to offer support that went beyond state-sponsored initiatives. The work traces how everyday practices and acts of solidarity, e.g. hosting, sharing, translating, and cohabiting, challenge conventional, state-centred geopolitics and security thinking.

My key contributions to 'Debordering Europe through the 2022 Ukrainian Refugee Crisis: Analysis of Responses in the UK, Poland and Romania' have included: 

• Understanding more-than-human forced displacement from Ukraine
• Attending to and analysing accounts of displacement with non-human animal companions 
• Developing more-than-human approaches to alter-geopolitics  

I teach widely across the BA (Hons) Geography programme of study and the MSc Global Development and MSc Disaster Management and Sustainable Development programmes of study. I am the module lead for KE7004: Sustainable Development and KE7006: Health and Well-being in Disaster and Development.  

I joined Northumbria University in 2018 to complete my PhD, which was fully funded by a competitive studentship. My doctoral research is informed by multi-site ethnography in Ukraine and interdisciplinary analysis of media, art, film, and television. The thesis mobilises intersectional feminist thinking and queer theories to advance geopolitical knowledge of Ukraine. Theoretically, it engages with the work of Mikhail Bakhtin in dialogue with an analysis of the symbolic, rhetorical, affectual, and intimate geopolitical body. The locus of the argument advances Bakhtinian thought to enable a nuanced and novel approach to the study of queer geopolitics; presenting ‘popular festive geopolitics’ as a lens on Ukrainian LGBTQ+ subjectivities and the bodily politics of the former Soviet Union. It is undergirded by an interest in spatial-temporal place and subjectivity making in the former Soviet Union as different and apart from the geopolitical West and is written in concert with decolonial literature that unsettles Western spatial-temporal hegemony.