Dr Magda Schmukalla is a psychosocial researcher and studies experiences of rupture, displacement, and transition by drawing on intimate, close-up perspectives and contemporary art. She completed her doctoral research on the liminality of post-communist experiences under the supervision of Prof Stephen Frosh and Prof Esther Leslie at Birkbeck College in 2017. In 2019, she was awarded an ESRC postdoctoral fellowship to publish her first monograph, Communist Ghosts (2021). She is lecturer and course-director of Psychoanalytic Studies at the University of Essex.

Liene Ozoliņa is an associate professor at the Latvian Academy of Culture. She holds a PhD in sociology from the London School of Economics and Political Science. Liene’s research interests span cultural and political sociology and social theory. She has conducted research on the processes of neoliberalisation, state-citizenship relations, and political ethics in post-socialism, relationship between nationalism and neoliberalism in the context of cultural policy and art production, and art as a form of social activism. Her book on austerity politics in the aftermath of the 2009 global economic crisis, titled Politics of Waiting: Workfare, post-Soviet austerity and the ethics of freedom, was published by Manchester University Press. Her articles have been published in the British Journal of Sociology, Nations and Nationalism, Slavic Review, Journal of Baltic Studies and East European Politics and Societies.