Alina Kontareva is a doctoral fellow at TIK – Center for Technology, Innovation, and Culture at the University of Oslo. In her doctoral dissertation, Alina explores the competition between global and regional platform firms. Using qualitative methods and multiple data sources, Alina examines social, economic, and political reasons why domestic internet leaders such as Yandex, VKontakte, Odnoklassniki, Ozon, and others thrived in Russia. As is the case in the US, China, and Western Europe, these platform firms are also transforming employment relationships in Russia. Alina is using her pre-doctoral fellowship at UW-Madison to work on the topic of platform employment. Her faculty supervisor is Yoshiko Herrera.