She received her PhD from the University of Helsinki in 2007, after which she was awarded a three-year fellowship in the Collegium of Advanced Studies at the University of Helsinki. She specialises in political sociology, the sociology of class and inequality, cultural studies, feminist research and Russian and post-socialist studies. She is the author of Democratization and Gender in Contemporary Russia (Routledge, 2008/2011) and the editor of Rethinking Class in Russia (Ashgate, 2012). Her papers have also appeared in Sociology, Europe-Asia Studies, Demokratizatsiya and British Journal of Sociology.