Alya Guseva is associate professor of sociology at Boston University where she teaches courses on economic sociology, healthcare and biomedical markets. She is an expert on sociology of money and consumer finance, and a co-founder and co-organizer of Finance and Society research network at the Society for Advancement of Socio-Economics. Guseva is the author of Into the Red: The Birth of the Credit Card Market in Postcommunist Russia and co-author of Plastic Money: Constructing Markets for Credit Cards in Eight Postcommunist Countries (with Akos Rona-Tas). Based on original fieldwork and dozens of interviews with finance industry professionals, the two books are a testament to the complicated nature of market-building in the context of post-communism transitions. Guseva’s work also appeared in journals such as American Sociological Review, Annual Review of Sociology, Socio-Economic Review, Social Science Research, Journal of Comparative Economics, East European Quarterly and Journal of Family Issues, among others. She is currently serving as Chief Editor of Socio-Economic Review.
After a decade-and-a-half of studying markets in consumer finance and household money management, Guseva is pursuing her long-standing interest in biomedical markets (specifically, assisted reproduction), healthcare and healthcare policy. She is working on a book tentatively entitled Medicine, Markets and Morality. It is focused on moral, legal and organizational aspects of markets for commercial surrogacy, and is based on observations at professional fertility and surrogacy events, and dozens of interviews with fertility and surrogacy providers and lawyers in Ukraine, Russia and Kazakhstan.
At the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies, Guseva chairs the Seminar on Social Exclusion and Inclusion.
