Olga Zabalueva

holds a Ph.D. in Culture Studies, and is an associate professor in Museology at the Department of Culture and Media Studies, Umeå University, Sweden. As a museum professional, she has more than ten years of experience working in various cultural institutions in Moscow and Sweden, including research and collection departments. In her doctoral dissertation, she studied the use of politics in the process of museum making (and unmaking), and the framing of ‘difficult issues’ addressed by cultural institutions in both the global and Swedish museum contexts. Zabalueva’s research focuses on the uses and abuses of heritage, museum politics, cultural memory, museum activism, and the intersections between these areas. She has particular interests in memory, politics, and heritage in the post-Soviet space, decolonial museology, and the relationship between new materialisms and the digital realm in museum collections.