I almost couldn’t have picked a better time to do fieldwork in Latvia. I arrived on Monday, and this week’s main political story was the formation of a new government. Two weeks ago, the previous government collapsed. The immediate trigger appears to have been a series of drone incidents, in which Ukrainian drones entered Latvian…
Amid all the uncertainty and bad news lately, I ended the year on a positive note when some good news about my research came in. In academia, good news usually means one thing: more research funding — and that’s exactly what happened. Thanks to this, I’ll be able to run two new survey experiments in…
It has been a while since my last blog post. Over the summer, I spent some time traveling in Kyrgyzstan — an unforgettable adventure. I loved driving along off-road routes (though getting stuck in the mud was less enjoyable), meeting kind and inventive people, and seeing the highest mountains I’ve ever encountered — some towering…
With the final interviews conducted, the official part of my stay in Estonia has come to an end. This past week in Narva offered me a different view of the country. Resulting not only from the conversations I had, but also in the language spoken on the streets, the architecture, and the general atmosphere of…
The main focus of this week’s fieldwork was the Tartu Conference on East European and Eurasian Studies. When I originally planned my stay in Estonia, I made sure to time it around this conference, and it did not disappoint. Before the start of the conference on Wednesday, I wrapped up my series of expert interviews….
Two weeks into my fieldwork in Estonia, and the list of interviews is growing—but more importantly, so is the list of unexpected insights and conversations. My second week in Estonia comes to a close with 40 citizen interviews and 5 expert interviews completed. But of course, numbers alone don’t tell the full story. In my…
As the first week of my fieldwork in Estonia comes to a close, it’s a good moment to reflect on my arrival and the work that’s already taken shape. I was warmly welcomed in Tartu at the Johan Skytte Institute of Political Studies. I was given an introduction and immediately included in the institute’s activities:…
Today I learned a valuable lesson: don’t leave your suitcase open on the floor if you live with two cats who are curious and shed constantly. You might want to ask why I’d have the suitcase open in the first place. Well, I was running around the house in my chaotic process of packing it,…
Obtaining a PhD is often compared to running a marathon. After mentioning this in a previous blog, I found myself reflecting more on the similarities between the two and wanted to explore the comparison further. The more I reflected, the more I realized: a PhD journey can be seen through the lens of many different…
A few weeks ago, I reached a milestone in my PhD journey—I finalized my first article and sent it off to an academic journal. But in the world of academia, “finalized” doesn’t mean “published”. Odds are, I’ll be revisiting this paper again, responding to reviewer comments, making revisions, and refining the arguments. Still, hitting this…