Dr Olga Zeveleva, a postdoctoral researcher on the team, has started her first stage of fieldwork. She is conducting a series of qualitative interviews with people who have worked for Moscow-based and St. Petersburg-based NGOs. The data Olga gathers during this stage of the project will allow us to analyse discourses produced by civil society organisations and NGOs, in order to understand how these groups of people create categories of vision and division of those drawn into Russia’s penal nexus.