I am a PhD Candidate in the East–West Psychology program at the California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS), an interdisciplinary graduate institution in San Francisco focused on consciousness studies, embodied phenomenology, and community-based psychology. As an intersex scholar, my work is informed by ongoing attention to positionality, embodiment, and the ethical conditions of knowledge production.
My research examines embodied consciousness (the lived organization of experience as it unfolds through bodily engagement with the world) from enactive (4E/4EA) and phenomenological perspectives. I focus on how intersex/innate variations of sex characteristics (IVSC) migrants in the United States live through and make sense of migration, medicalization, and social regulation. At a broader theoretical level, my work addresses a key challenge in consciousness studies: how can embodied consciousness be understood as it is lived within specific bodily, social, and institutional contexts, without reducing it to either biological determinism or abstract cognitive models? I focus on pre-reflective experience and forms of embodied awareness that precede explicit reflection or narrative articulation.
Rather than treating innate bodily difference as an experiential essence or identity, I approach intersex embodiment as a material condition that introduces durable constraints within which meaning, agency, and sense-making are negotiated over time.
Methodologically, I work within phenomenological and enactive frameworks, using qualitative approaches including micro-phenomenological interviews, body mapping, and semi-structured interviews. These methods allow me to examine embodied experience as processual, situated, and relational, while remaining attentive to how social, cultural, institutional, and bodily conditions shape conscious life. My analytic approach combines reflexive thematic analysis, micro-phenomenological analysis, and interpretive analysis of visual and embodied data, while reflexive and autoethnographic practices help me critically examine how my embodied and experiential positionality as an intersex migrant shapes the research process.
My doctoral dissertation, Lived Experiences and Embodied Consciousness among Intersex/IVSC Migrants in the United States: A Qualitative Study Informed by Phenomenological and Enactive Approaches, investigates how consciousness is shaped and reconfigured through embodied sense-making amid migration, medicalization, and institutional regulation. Across this work, I seek to contribute to an enactive-phenomenological account of consciousness by showing how experience is constituted through pre-reflective bodily processes, sensorimotor engagement, affective dynamics, and institutional conditions, and how forms of embodied meaning and agency unfold under constraints.
Academically, I hold an MSc in Nonprofit Management from The New School and a BSc in Sociology from Kemerovo State University. I have training in Embodied Cognition and the Micro-Phenomenological Interview Method.
In 2013, I founded the Association of Russian-Speaking Intersex People (ARSI), the first intersex advocacy organization in Russia. Due to political circumstances, I immigrated to the U.S. in 2014 and was granted asylum in 2017.
*‘Innate Variations of sex characteristics (IVSC)’ refers to innate variations in chromosomal, gonadal, and/or anatomical sex characteristics that may not align with typical binary definitions of male or female.
My research examines embodied consciousness (the lived organization of experience as it unfolds through bodily engagement with the world) from enactive (4E/4EA) and phenomenological perspectives. I focus on how intersex/innate variations of sex characteristics (IVSC) migrants in the United States live through and make sense of migration, medicalization, and social regulation. At a broader theoretical level, my work addresses a key challenge in consciousness studies: how can embodied consciousness be understood as it is lived within specific bodily, social, and institutional contexts, without reducing it to either biological determinism or abstract cognitive models? I focus on pre-reflective experience and forms of embodied awareness that precede explicit reflection or narrative articulation.
Rather than treating innate bodily difference as an experiential essence or identity, I approach intersex embodiment as a material condition that introduces durable constraints within which meaning, agency, and sense-making are negotiated over time.
Methodologically, I work within phenomenological and enactive frameworks, using qualitative approaches including micro-phenomenological interviews, body mapping, and semi-structured interviews. These methods allow me to examine embodied experience as processual, situated, and relational, while remaining attentive to how social, cultural, institutional, and bodily conditions shape conscious life. My analytic approach combines reflexive thematic analysis, micro-phenomenological analysis, and interpretive analysis of visual and embodied data, while reflexive and autoethnographic practices help me critically examine how my embodied and experiential positionality as an intersex migrant shapes the research process.
My doctoral dissertation, Lived Experiences and Embodied Consciousness among Intersex/IVSC Migrants in the United States: A Qualitative Study Informed by Phenomenological and Enactive Approaches, investigates how consciousness is shaped and reconfigured through embodied sense-making amid migration, medicalization, and institutional regulation. Across this work, I seek to contribute to an enactive-phenomenological account of consciousness by showing how experience is constituted through pre-reflective bodily processes, sensorimotor engagement, affective dynamics, and institutional conditions, and how forms of embodied meaning and agency unfold under constraints.
Academically, I hold an MSc in Nonprofit Management from The New School and a BSc in Sociology from Kemerovo State University. I have training in Embodied Cognition and the Micro-Phenomenological Interview Method.
In 2013, I founded the Association of Russian-Speaking Intersex People (ARSI), the first intersex advocacy organization in Russia. Due to political circumstances, I immigrated to the U.S. in 2014 and was granted asylum in 2017.
*‘Innate Variations of sex characteristics (IVSC)’ refers to innate variations in chromosomal, gonadal, and/or anatomical sex characteristics that may not align with typical binary definitions of male or female.
