Sasha (Aleksandra) Kurlenkova is a social scientist interested in body, technologies, and disability.
In 2015-2016, Sasha gained a Master’s degree in Sociology from Shaninka (Moscow School of Social and Economic Sciences). She also worked as a researcher at the Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology, Russian Academy of Sciences, studying sensory practices and assistive technologies used by blind and low-vision people, through ethnography and qualitative interviews.
Since 2018, Sasha has been a PhD student at the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication where she studies organization of assisted / eyetracker-mediated interactions of kids with speech disabilities inside Russian-speaking families. She uses Ethnography and Conversation Analysis to understand the multimodal methods and resources used by kids and their families to talk to each other: from low-tech (gaze, gestures, objects in the environment) to high-tech (a speech-synthesizer, an eye-tracker).