Olga Zabalueva is Associate Professor at the Department of Culture and Media Studies, Umeå University, and holds a PhD in Culture Studies. Her research examines museology as a discipline, museums and the (re)construction of identities, Memory Studies, and museum activism. She holds an MA in Museology from the Russian State University for the Humanities in Moscow and a second MA in Applied Cultural Analysis from Lund University, Sweden. As a museum professional, she brings over a decade of experience working in research and collection departments at cultural institutions in both Moscow and Sweden.
Zabalueva completed her PhD in Culture and Society at Linköping University, Sweden, focusing on the politics of museum making and unmaking, the framing of difficult issues in museum contexts, and the development of socially relevant museum practices based on agonistic memory frameworks. Her research bridges theory and practice in museum and cultural heritage studies, concentrating on the uses and abuses of heritage, museum politics, cultural memory, and museum activism. She maintains particular interest in memory, politics, and heritage in the post-Soviet space, decolonial museology, the working conditions of museum professionals, and the relationship between new materialisms and the digital realm in museum collections.
She is a member of the International Council of Museums (ICOM) and the Memory Studies Association (MSA), and serves on the board of the Swedish Genus i museer (Gender in Museums) association.
(source photo: https://magasink.se/; source bio https://www.umu.se/)
