Svetlana Stephenson is a Reader in Sociology at London Metropolitan University. She had worked at the Russian Centre for Public Opinion Research (Levada centre), and was a Leverhulme Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Essex.  Among her publications are Gangs of Russia. From the Streets to the Corridors of Power, Cornell University Press, 2015 (awarded the 2015 Alec Nove Prize by the British Association for Slavonic and East European Studies) and Crossing the Line. Vagrancy, Homelessness and Social Displacement in Russia, Ashgate, 2006. Her articles on the Russian gangs were published in The Sociological Review, Current Sociology, and Global Crime.