Dr Anna Plyushteva

Anna is Departmental Research Lecturer at the School of Geography and the Environment and the Transport Studies Unit. Her current work is organised around three key themes: gender and care; infrastructures of urban mobility; and 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 holds a PhD (2016) in Human Geography from University College London. Her work has been funded by the ESRC, EC Horizon 2020, and the University of Oxford John Fell Fund.

Gender and care. Anna’s work on this theme has examined the gendered roles and lifecourse transitions in care-related mobility in the Philippines and the UK. Currently, Anna is Co-I on the ESRC-funded project Care on the Move (2024-2026, PI Middleton), which focuses on the everyday mobilities of children with non-visible disabilities.

Infrastructures of urban mobility. Under this theme, Anna has examined how infrastructures as socio-technical relations organise urban life spatially and temporally. For instance, recent work has traced the production of urban flood risk in Manila, the Philippines, at the intersections of transport, household waste, and drainage systems. Current work examines the enactment of reversibility in the production of urban infrastructure futures in Bulgaria and the UK.

Everyday economies. This strand of work draws on economic sociology and geography to understand how households navigate economic and emotional relations. Recent work under this theme has focused on transport affordability 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. The project Care on the Move is a collaboration with local and national organisations, including Swindon SEND Families Voice, SENDIASS Oxfordshire, and Living Streets. Previously, Anna 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 inclusive transport infrastructure appraisal. 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.

• Plyushteva, A. (forthcoming) Worrying the right amount: intimate relationships and the emotional work of pursuing financial literacy together, Economy and Society.
• 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