معرفی
Anna Žabicka is an Acting Researcher at Riga Stradins University and a PhD candidate at the University of Vienna. She serves as a student assistant in the Latvian Council of Science-funded project 'Enhancing General Practitioner Resilience in Latvia' (2024-2025), focusing on primary care challenges in Latvia.
Her educational background includes:
- PhD Candidate in Social Sciences, University of Vienna (2019–present), researching 'All roads lead to the Pansionāts: state care as a socio-spatial fixture in emptying rural Latvia'
- Master of Other Social Sciences, Wayne State University (2017–2019; awarded April 2019)
- Master of Other Social Sciences, Riga Stradins University (2012–2014; awarded June 2014)
Žabicka's research centers on ageing, care systems, kinship networks, public health inequality, and death practices within Latvia's socio-spatial context. Her work critically examines how state care institutions interact with familial structures in rural depopulation scenarios, employing anthropological methods to analyze violence, historical medical frameworks, and caregiving inequalities. She actively investigates how kinship concepts shape parliamentary discourse and policy formation.
Analysis of her 2015-2024 publications reveals a cohesive trajectory from institutional ethnography of care centers toward policy-relevant kinship studies. Her recent work demonstrates increasing focus on Latvian parliamentary debates and pandemic-era care adaptations, consistently applying anthropological lenses to public health challenges while maintaining strong regional specificity in the Baltic context.
Žabicka actively contributes to academic discourse through conference presentations on topics including 'Chasing the rainbow: how young American queers are moving elsewhere' (2024) and 'Inventing the virus and fixing the kin' (2022). As a member of The Association for Anthropology and Gerontology and the Life Course (2024–present), she engages with international aging research networks while advancing national health resilience projects.
