Alexandra Rottenberg (Dmitrieva)

Biography

She received her PhD degree in Sociology at St. Petersburg State University in 2013. The thesis was aimed at exploring how Giddens’s theory of structuration works to explain in what forms drug use is produced and reproduced in Russia. She has extensive experience of working as a qualitative researcher and field ethnographer in different international research projects where the main topics of study were drug use and drug policy, HIV/AIDS prevention and control, social work with people who use drugs, access to human rights and legal justice in civil and prison healthcare systems.

During 2012-2014, she was the elected president of the St. Petersburg association of sociologists. In 2017, she co-founded the Support, research and Development Center, a Kyiv-based NGO aimed at conducting qualitative social research of drug use, health and medicine. The center was awarded grants to conduct studies aimed at exploring the sphere of opioid agonist therapy provision and prisoners’ access to health care and harm reduction programs.