TRANSPORT STUDIES UNIT

• Departmental Research Lecturer in Transport Studies

• Email: anna.plyushteva@ouce.ox.ac.uk

About

Anna is a Departmental Research Lecturer in Transport Studies at the School of Geography and the Environment and the Transport Studies Unit. Anna's research and teaching focus on urban mobilities and infrastructures, specifically on the roles they play in the socio-material organisation of cities, different forms of inequality, and gendered relations.

Anna was appointed in 2019, having previously worked as a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at the Free University Brussels (2017-2019), and Research Associate and Programme Coordinator at the Transport Studies Unit (2016). Her work draws on a range of mostly qualitative methods and currently focuses on South-East Europe and the UK. Anna's doctoral research at University College London (2016) focused on new ways of understanding the impact of a new metro line on commuters in Sofia, Bulgaria.

Anna currently serves on the Executive Committee of the UTSG, and the SoGE Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Committee.

Current Research

• Transport fares and the socio-material relations of affordability. This project (funded by the OUP John Fell Fund) develops new theoretical and methodological approaches to transport affordability, drawing on science & technology studies, economic sociology, and feminist economic geography.
• • Intersectional approaches to inclusion in appraising new transport infrastructure (funded by the University of Oxford's ESRC Impact Acceleration Account) This project is a collaboration with partners from the private and public sectors. Focusing on the case study of the Pennine Reach rapid bus link in Lancashire, it takes a mixed-method approach to understanding the differentiated impact of transport schemes along gender, income, and race/ethnicity lines. The project aims to develop a toolkit for accounting for these unequal impacts in transport appraisal.

Teaching and Supervision

• Undergraduate teaching: Space, Place & Society; Transport & Mobilities
• Graduate teaching: Urban Infrastructure Futures, Sustainable Urban Development
• Executive education: Global Challenges in Transport: Infrastructures

Anna supervises MSc dissertations and doctoral students at the School of Geography and the Environment. She also serves as College Advisor to graduate students at St Antony's College.

Outreach

Anna strives to build lasting collaborations with organisations beyond academia. She has worked on encouraging walking to school and on workplace mobility planning with Sofia Municipality, contributed to a UK Department for Transport report on young people's changing travel habits, participated in the Brussels Centre Observatory, and collaborated with advocacy group Spasi Sofia.

Selected Publications

A full list is available via Google Scholar.

Journal Articles

• Plyushteva, A. (2022) Essential workers' pandemic mobilities and the changing meanings of the commute. The Geographical Journal.
• Plyushteva, A. (2022) Negotiating dignity in public geography: The ethics of public engagement in pandemic times. Area.
• Plyushteva, A. and Schwanen, T. (2022) "We usually have a bit of flood once a week": conceptualising the infrastructural rhythms of urban floods in Malate, Manila. Urban Geography.
• Farina, L., Boussauw, K. and Plyushteva, A. (2021) Moving safely at night? Women's nocturnal mobilities in Recife, Brazil and Brussels, Belgium. Gender, Place and Culture.
• Plyushteva, A. and Boussauw, K. (2020) Does night-time public transport contribute to inclusive night mobility? Exploring Sofia's night bus network from a gender perspective. Transport Policy, 87: 41-50.
• Plyushteva, A. (2019) Commutes and co-workers: complicating individual journeys through workplace relations. Built Environment, 45(4): 513-530.
• Plyushteva, A. (2019) Commuting and the urban night: nocturnal mobilities in tourism and hospitality work. Journal of Policy Research in Tourism, Leisure and Events, 11(3): 407-421.
• Plyushteva, A. and Schwanen, T. (2018) Care-related journeys over the life course: Thinking mobility biographies with gender, care and the household. Geoforum, 97: 131-141.
• Barnfield, A. and Plyushteva, A. (2016) Cycling in the post-socialist city: On travelling by bicycle in Sofia, Bulgaria. Urban Studies, 53(9): 1822-1835.

Book Chapters

• Hopkins, D. and Plyushteva, A. (2022) Transport. In, Lees, L. and Demeritt, D. (eds.) Concise Encyclopedia of Human Geography. Edward Elgar Publishers. Elgar Encyclopedias in the Social Sciences series.
• Plyushteva, A. and Barnfield, A. (2020) Navigating cycling infrastructure in a post-socialist city. In, Koglin, T. and Cox, P. (eds.) The Politics of Cycling Infrastructure: Spaces and (In)equality. Bristol: Policy Press. pp. 195-210.
• Plyushteva, A. (2019) Predictability and propinquity on the Sofia Metro: Everyday metro journeys and long-term relations of transport infrastructuring. Chapter 11 in, Tuvikene, T., Sgibnev, W. and Neugebauer, C.S. (eds.) Post-Socialist Urban Infrastructures. Routledge, London. pp. 178-194.

Reports

• Chatterjee, K., Goodwin, P., Schwanen, T., Clark, B., Jain, J., Melia, S., Middleton, J., Plyushteva, A., Ricci, M., Santos, G. and Stokes, G. (2018) Young People's Travel - What's Changed and Why? Review and Analysis. Report to Department for Transport. University of the West of England, Bristol.

Edited Special Issues

• Plyushteva, A., Mineva, M. and Nikolova, H. (2019) The Urban Night: Governance, Diversity, Mobility. University of National and World Economy Yearbook, 2019(1, 2).