• Assistant Professor of Leadership Studies, University of Richmond

Dr. Volha Chykina's work focuses on how politics shapes education. American political scientist Harold Lasswell famously defined politics as a fight over“who gets what, when, and how.” Chykina researches where these distributional concerns intersect with education, often determining who gets to study or say what, when, and how, and who gets to succeed. Recent media headlines point to pitched battles on the politics of education in countries such as Hungary, and closer to home, in states such as Florida and Virginia.

In her research, Chykina tries to understand how exclusionary attitudes and policymaking shape the educational environments and outcomes of historically underrepresented students. To do this, she uses a range of quantitative methods, from social network analysis to conjoint experiments; develops new measures; and leverages both sub-national data from the United States and cross-national data.

Chykina received her doctorate in educational theory and policy and comparative and international education from the Pennsylvania State University. Prior to joining the Jepson School, she was a postdoctoral fellow with the Donia Human Rights Center at the University of Michigan. Her research has been published or is forthcoming in Sociological Science; International Journal of Comparative Sociology; British Journal of Sociology of Education; European Journal of Education; Socius; Sociological Perspectives; The Social Science Journal; Compare: A Journal of Comparative and International Education; Globalisation, Societies and Education; European Education; PLOS One; and the International Journal of Sociology of Education.

• –present Assistant Professor of Leadership Studies, University of Richmond

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