Dr. Aksana Zakirova

Aksana Zakirova studied Russian and English linguistics at the Nizhniy Novgorod State Linguistic University in Russia from 2005 to 2011. She obtained her Master of Science in Agricultural Economics in 2017 from the University of Hohenheim in Stuttgart. From 2019 to 2025, she worked as a doctoral researcher in the BMBF-funded junior research group TRANSECT at the Eberswalde University for Sustainable Development (HNEE) in cooperation with the University of Augsburg, where she obtained her doctorate in Human Geography. She investigated the long-term impact of Soviet agricultural legacies on contemporary cotton farming in Tajikistan. Her doctoral research combines political ecology, resilience thinking and path dependency approaches to analyse socio-ecological transformations and rural livelihoods. In between her studies, she worked on agricultural development projects in Kyrgyzstan with the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) and the World Bank, gaining experience in international development cooperation.

At the GWZO, Aksana Zakirova works within the project »Cotton Empire in the East«. She investigates the networks of exchange that connected cotton-producing localities in the Tajik SSR to the socialist world and broader global flows of knowledge, expertise and commodities. 

• Cotton production and trade during the Cold War
• Agricultural knowledge transfer
• Socio-ecological transformations and rural livelihoods in Central Asia
• Agricultural development and economics

From 2022 to 2025, Aksana Zakirova contributed to teaching in the socio-economic module at the Eberswalde University for Sustainable Development (HNEE). Her lectures and seminars focused on qualitative research methods in authoritarian contexts and agricultural extension services in Central Asia, drawing on her long-term research and development work in the region.