Aleksandra Szymczyk

Aleksandra Szymczyk is a PhD Candidate and Teaching Assistant in Social Anthropology at the University of Manchester. Her doctoral project examines political engagement, mobilisation and everyday politics in Poland under the right-wing Law and Justice government. She conducted 13 months of ethnographic fieldwork in a small town in north-central Poland in the run-up to the 2023 parliamentary elections.

Aleksandra’s PhD project examines the ways in which political actors and local intellectuals understand and navigate political division, the relationship between local governance and national politics, as well as the role of memory and heritage in local politics. During her fieldwork, Aleksandra collaborated with the Department of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology at the Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń to organise a week-long fieldwork trip with undergraduate students as part of their training in the ethnographic method.

Supervisors: Stef Jansen and Soumhya Venkatesan

Aleksandra holds a BSc in Psychology from the University of East Anglia and an MA in Social Anthropology from the University of Manchester. At the Manchester Metropolitan University's Policy Evaluation and Research Unit, she worked as a Research Associate on several European research projects: the Horizon 2020 Cohort Community Research and Development (COORDINATE), Migrant Children and Communities in a Transforming Europe (MiCREATE), and Growing Up in Digital Europe (GUIDE). She also contributed to A Stitch in Time, a collaboration between MetroPolis (Manchester Metropolitan University's policy think tank) and the Royal Society of Arts on foresight and futures thinking, and was part of the team leading the participatory research project Futures of Youth Work with the European Academy on Youth Work (EAYW).

Aleksandra is currently a Teaching Assistant for Anthropology of Art, Sound and Images (1st Year BSocSc Social Anthropology). In previous semesters, she taught Human and the Digital and Political and Economic Anthropology (2nd Year BSocSc Social Anthropology). During her time as a Research Associate at the Manchester Metropolitan University's Policy Evaluation and Research Unit, she led workshops and seminars for Creative Research Methods (2nd Year BA Sociology/Criminology) and Analysing Social Problems (1st Year BA Sociology), as well as serving as a personal tutor for undergraduate students and co-supervising an MA dissertation.

Aleksandra is an Associate Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (AFHEA) and a member of the European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA), the Association of Social Anthropologists (ASA), the European Sociological Association (ESA) and the Polish Ethnological Society (PTL).