Dr Catherine Owen

Summary:

I am Associate Professor of International Relations at the University of Exeter's Penryn Campus in Cornwall. I am co-director of the Exeter Centre for Eastern European and Eurasian Studies and the ESRC Pathway Lead for PhD studentships in Global Challenges and Transformations. Between 2023 and 2025, I was Visiting Chair Professor at the Institute of International and Area Studies, Tsinghua University, Beijing. Between 2017 and 2021, I was British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Exeter.

An ethnographer of governance processes in Eurasia, my work has been funded by the AHRC, ESRC, British Academy, UK Foreign Office and British Council. I am interested in the way in which global trends in public sector management are reproduced and reconfigured at the local level in these contexts, creating new mechanisms for citizen participation. Drawing on extensive fieldwork conducted in Russia, Kyrgyzstan and China, my work explores the political subjectivities produced through these mechanisms; I think that moving beyond a focus on the presence, absence or distortion of elections is important for understanding both how political participation is curated and experienced, and how broader policy processes work, in Eurasia.

This observation has led to a second research interest, namely the politics of knowledge production in the Social Sciences, non-Western approaches to knowledge production and the relationship between Area Studies and International Relations. I am especially interested in how the social and cultural context of scholars shapes the knowledge they produce about world.

Links to my publications can be found on my Academia page.

Biography:

Following my Bachelors at Durham University in Modern European Languages (French and German), I spent three years in Berlin working as a translator, journalist and historical guide, and in St Petersburg working as an English teacher and volunteer with the Russian human rights organisation, Memorial. These experiences forged in me a deep interest in the politics and lived experiences of post-communism. I returned to academia to undertake, first, an MA in International Relations and then a PhD, both at the University of Exeter, the latter which was awarded in 2015. The thesis examined Russian state discourses and social practices of civic participation in local governance during the Putin era. During my PhD, under the supervision of Prof John Heathershaw, I developed an interest in local governance in Central Asia, and spent time volunteering in the suburbs of Bishkek. Upon completion of my PhD, I moved to Xi'an, China, and spent two years working as Lecturer in Central Asian Studies in the Department of History and Civilization, Shaanxi Normal University.

In September 2017, I began a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship based at the University of Exeter, which allowed me to build on my PhD research and explore participatory governance in Russia and China from a comparative perspective. I was promoted to Senior Lecturer at the University of Exeter's Penryn Campus in February 2021, and to Associate Professor in July 2024.

I have held Visiting Fellowships at the European University at St Petersburg (2012), Fudan Development Institute, Shanghai (2017), the St Petersburg branch of the Russian Academy of National Economy and Public Administration (2018), and the Aleksanteri Institute, University of Helsinki (2019). Between 2023 and 2025, I undertook a two-year visiting professorship at the Institute of International and Area Studies, Tsinghua University, where I spent the autumn semester based in Beijing.

In January 2020, I became a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (FHEA).

I speak fluent French, German and Russian, and intermediate Mandarin Chinese.

When not at the university, I can probably be found on my bicycle somewhere along the back lanes of Devon and Cornwall.

Research supervision:

I am glad to supervise projects relating to any of the following themes:

- The governance of Russia or China
- Civic participation in Eurasia
- the politics of knowlege production in International Relations

Please contact me by e-mail to discuss your ideas.

Current PhD students:

Sean Hotung (co-supervised with Dr Richard Edwards)
Zhanat Myrzabekov (first supervisor, Prof John Heathershaw)

Yuan Zhang (first supervisor, Prof Laleh Khalili)

Caice Jin (first supervisor, Dr Andrea Ghiselli)

Lemeng Shi (co-supervised with Dr Xianan Jin)