Dr. Valeria Lazarenko
Valeria Lazarenko joined the IRS in April 2022. She is a researcher in the Research Area “Politics and Planning” working with topics of migration and appropriation of urban spaces by newly migrants. Her main research focus is decision-making of Ukrainian migrants towards their perspective on settling down in German cities. For her research she was granted a Philipp Schwartz scholarship for scholars at risk from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation.
She studied social psychology at the Kyiv National Taras Shevchenko University and completed her PhD thesis (2020) at the Research Institute for Social and Political Psychology in Kyiv, Ukraine. In her research she examined the construction of spatial identities and appropriation of spaces by internally displaced people in Ukraine. In 2017-2019 she was a researcher of the Eurasian Peace Studies Exchange project and a visiting researcher at the Center for Peace Studies at the UiT - The Arctic University of Norway (2018). She also was a former guest researcher at the chair for Cultural Geography at the University of Bayreuth (2018-2019), this visit was funded by the German Academic Exchange Service.
In 2021-2022 she was associated with Kyiv-based independent think tank Cedos, where she was a policy analyst, an expert in housing and migration, and the research lead in the project on the impact of full-scale war on the civil population in Ukraine.
