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About me
About me
My name is Liudmila (Mila) Listrovaya, and I am a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Weiser Center for Europe and Eurasia at the University of Michigan. I am a sociologist specializing in Environmental and Political Sociology.
I study how authoritarian regimes engineer inequality—by allocating environmental risk, restricting mobility and rights, and narrowing the space for political voice—and how these dynamics spill across borders and ecosystems. Working at the intersection of political and environmental sociology, I combine in-depth interviews, field observation, discourse analysis, and statistical modeling to trace the mechanisms that maintain power and produce unequal life chances. This mixed-methods approach lets me connect lived experience with population-level patterns, revealing how decisions about who bears pollution, who is conscripted or displaced, and who gets to speak reverberate locally, regionally, and transnationally.The first line of my work investigates the human consequences of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Through multi-sited fieldwork with Russian relokanti, I show how “extraterritorial authoritarianism” travels with migrants, encouraging strategic silence in both public and private life; a solo-authored article from this project appears in Social Forces.
Currently I am developing a book on adaptation, epistemic violence, and repression among Russian political migrants that moved to Georgia, Serbia, and Germany.
Complementing the qualitative research, my quantitative study of male mortality across Russia’s regions (2018–2023) demonstrates that wartime mobilization amplified existing inequalities: economically deprived areas and legally designated Indigenous homelands experienced disproportionate post-2022 increases in male mortality.
The second line examines environmental politics under authoritarian rule, where extractive industries function as both tools and outcomes of governance. I document how environmental burdens are concentrated in ethnically diverse and Indigenous regions and how state narratives and regulatory discretion normalize harm while suppressing resistance.
Publications include an article in Society & Natural Resources and Environmental Sociology, a solo-authored manuscript under review at Environmental Sociology, and an invited contribution on climate obstruction to a Climate and Development special issue. Partnering with exiled environmental activists and Indigenous associations, I link environmental justice to debates on authoritarian environmentalism, clarifying when extractive projects entrench center–periphery hierarchies and where communities can carve out constrained spaces for voice.
Both strands of my research are united by a central concern with how authoritarian systems create and sustain inequality—whether through the management of natural resources or the control of people—and how these processes are felt and negotiated on the ground. My research has been recognized with prestigious awards and grants exceeding $80,000 to date.
I speak Russian, English, and Mandarin Chinese. Before coming to the U.S. to pursue a Ph.D., I lived in St. Petersburg, where I earned a Specialist degree from St. Petersburg State University in 2015. During my undergraduate studies, I also lived and studied in Taiwan (成功大学) and China (天津外国语大学).Page updated
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