Dr Anna Plyushteva

Anna is Departmental Research Lecturer at the School of Geography and the Environment and the Transport Studies Unit. Anna's current work is organised around three key themes: gender and mobilities of care; infrastructures and the socio-material organisation of cities; everyday economies.

Anna was appointed in 2019, having previously worked as a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at the Free University Brussels (2017-2019), and Research Associate and Programme Coordinator at the Transport Studies Unit (2016). Her work draws on a range of mostly qualitative methods and currently focuses on South-East Europe and the UK. Anna's doctoral research at University College London (2016) focused on new ways of understanding the impact of a new metro line on commuters in Sofia, Bulgaria. Anna’s work to date has been funded by the ESRC, EC Horizon 2020, and the University of Oxford John Fell Fund.

Gender and mobilities of care. Work on this theme has focused on gendered roles and lifecourse transitions in everyday mobilities of care in the Philippines and the UK. From 2024, a new research project, with Dr Jennie Middleton, will examine the role of care in the everyday mobilities of children with non-visible disabilities.

Infrastructures and the socio-material organisation of cities. Under this theme, Anna has examined how infrastructures as socio-technical relations organise urban life spatially and temporally. Recently, this has included examining the interactions of transport, household waste, and drainage systems in the production of flood risk in Manila, the Philippines.

Everyday economies. This strand of work draws on economic sociology and cultural economy to understand how everyday practices of money and finance are organised. Recent work under this theme has focused on transport affordability in Sofia, Bulgaria, as a situated relation; the moral arguments around ‘fare evasion’; and the negotiation of money worries within intimate relationships.

Anna teaches on the FHS option in Transport & Mobilities, and convenes the MSc elective in Urban Infrastructure Futures. She also contributes to the MSc in Sustainable Urban Development and the executive education programme in Global Challenges in Transport.

Anna supervises MSc dissertations and doctoral research at the School of Geography and the Environment. She is not currently accepting new research students.

Current Graduate Research Students

Anna strives to build lasting collaborations with organisations beyond academia. In recent years, she has worked with essential workers during the Covid-19 pandemic to document their everyday experiences, and collaborated with Lancashire County Council and Jacobs on intersectional approaches to gender as part of inclusive transport planning. She has previously contributed to 'walk to school' campaigns and workplace mobility planning strategies by Sofia Municipality; a UK Department for Transport report on young people's changing travel habits; and the campaign work of advocacy group Spasi Sofia.

• Hopkins, D. and Plyushteva, A. (2023) Transport geographies. In, Lees, L. and Demeritt, D. (eds.) Concise Encyclopedia of Human Geography. Edward Elgar.
• Munoz Zech, D., Lee, K. and Plyushteva, A. (2023) Beyond fare evasion: the everyday moralities of non-payment and underpayment on public transport. Mobilities [Preprint].
• Plyushteva, A. (2023). Affording mobility: Attending to the socio-material affordances of transport un/affordability. Journal of Transport Geography, 108, 103558.
• Plyushteva, A. (2022) Essential workers’ pandemic mobilities and the changing meanings of the commute. Geographical Journal, 188(3), pp. 459–463.
• Plyushteva, A. and Schwanen, T. (2022) "We usually have a bit of flood once a week": conceptualising the infrastructural rhythms of urban floods in Malate, Manila. Urban Geography [Preprint].

See Google Scholar for full overview of publications