Alena Zelenskaia is a research assistant and a PhD student at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, Germany. In the project, developed at the Cooperative Research Center “Cultures of Vigilance”, Alena focuses on practices and strategies of the EU border making towards marriage migrants from Third countries and ways how the migrants and their spouses undo the borders. Due to the changed environment of the fieldwork during the pandemic, besides the traditional ethnographic methods of interview and participant observation, Alena has also undertaken thematic discourse-analysis of Facebook groups and TV-Shows. Her training (BA from the Southern Federal University, Russia) and experience in journalism has vastly contributed to it.
Alena holds an MA in International Relations from St. Petersburg State University and an MA in Anthropology from the European University at St. Petersburg. Her second Master thesis was dedicated to the identification of Russian-speaking refugees in Germany. After graduation Alena worked as an instructor at the American University of Central Asia in Kyrgyzstan, where she taught courses on migration and mass media research methods. Her research interests include migration, bureaucracy, minority issues, nationalism, identity development, and mass media communication.