about.
Doctor Kseniya Navazhylava is a permanent professor in Management and Organisation and researcher of the Business Research group based at Leonard da Vinci Business School (Ecole de Management Leonard de Vinci) and a former Head of the change initiative related to Master Theses (2019-2021).
Kseniya's research centers on social structuration around technology, such as the questions of identity and well-being, and is published in top journals (Organization, JBR, IJHRM). Kseniya has frequently presented her work at leading management conferences, including Academy of Management Annual Meeting (AOM), European Group for Organisation Studies (EGOS), PROS, ISEOR, IFIP, and Ethnography Symposium. Kseniya has served as ad-hoc reviewer for leading management journals and conferences.
To date, Kseniya has taught various management courses at the undergraduate and graduate programs in France and Germany, including Organisational Behaviour, Managing People and Organisations, Leading Organisations, and Scientific Research Methods courses such as Research Bootcamp and Qualitative Data Analysis.
​
Kseniya completed her PhD in 2016 at HEC Paris, France and a postdoctoral program at Grenoble Ecole de Management (GEM). She participated to KIN Summer School in Amsterdam, IDEA Summer school in Capri, and Medici Summer school in Florence. She also holds a BA and Master Degree from Belarusian State University (Belarus), M.Sc. from European Humanities University International (Lithuania), and is an alumni of Fullbright Scholarship in the name of Lane Kirkland (Poland). Also, Kseniya was a Vice-President in charge of social events at BPF Association and the Founder of the Birds of Feather, a writers' circle aiming at constructive critique. Kseniya is an author of the book of poetry translations from Marina Tsvetaeva called "Between Paris and Moscow". The book, illustrated with Kseniya's original paintings, is available at Amazon. With her visual art, Kseniya has taken part in an exhibition "Si j'etais une femme" devoted to celebrating African women in science (2025).
"Kseniya is a determined and creative researcher. The topics she addresses are timely and managerially very relevant. She has a talent for locating and accessing rich contexts that are non-mainstream, and so contributes to diversifying who and what is represented in academic research."
​
Kristine De Valck,
Associate Professor, HEC
"Kseniya is a hard working and very driven person. Coming from an Eastern European background, she has succeeded in making a cultural transition to France, putting together a dissertation in English, and in constructing a professional network... this is strong evidence of intense motivation and indicative of her ability to continue developing as a scholar in a competitive environment."
Joelle Evans,
Lecturer in Organizational Behaviour,
Bayes Business School
“I have known Kseniya for the past six years since she participated in the in the IDEA qualitative summer school that I co-organize in Capri. She has become my colleague in 2016 when she started a postdoctoral position at Grenoble École de Management in Organizations, Work, Identity, Careers Research Group that I lead. In addition we are working together as coauthors for the past years on a number of research papers, one of which has been accepted to Organization.
I find Kseniya to be quite personable and pleasant to work with, and a responsible and collaborative coauthor. In our work together, she has been diligent, flexible and quite reliable.."
​
Gazi Isam
Associate Professor Organizations, Work, Identity and Careers Research Group
Grenoble Ecole de Management
"Ksenia has been a regular attendant to the philosophical groups I organize. She is a good listener and when she intervenes she is to the point and has interesting ideas to express. Her presence is always appreciated by the other members of the group. When she disagrees with something she never attacks the person but defends what she believes. A very pleasant person indeed!"
Michael Muszlak,
organiser of English Philosophy Group, Paris
research statement.
In my research, I explore various topics around information technologies in the workplace. My dissertation has suggested a transparency perspective on the use of social media at the workplace. With Gazi Islam and Marcos Barros at GEM we study connections of digital technologies to organizational symbolic practices, such as rituals, holistic identities, and well-being practices. With Amanda Peticca Harris of GEM and Sara RSTA Elias of University of Victoria we explore a link between technologies and practices of well-being during crisis.
​
This interest to technology is rooted in my PHD dissertation work that investigates the ways, in which professionals are making sense of new ambiguous technology (social media) to use it strategically for their online knowledge collaboration. To explore this, I focus on the situated norms, meanings and actions with and around organizational use of social media.
In my dissertation, I take advantage of an exceptionally rich site: a mid-sized publishing house in Central Europe. This organization enticed employees to register themselves on social media meant for managing non-work relations with an eye at imposing organizational communication over the private network that was already there. However, no concrete guidelines were prescribed for the journalists and the advertising agents who worked jointly to deliver the most popular newspaper in the country. As a result, this ambiguous technology became a space for intense and evolving negotiations over the definition of professional behavior. And as such space, the research site also presented a unique opportunity to explore issues of autonomy, identity and transparency.
​
Since successfully defending my PhD degree, my regular participation in conferences in the field of Management and recent publications in academic journals attest to my active stance as a researcher. There hasn't been a day in my professional career in Academia that I was not thinking, writing, or editing a research project. My passion for research is a guarantee of intrinsic motivation for exploring the multiple interfaces between humans and machines.
teaching statement.
Drawing on ten years of teaching experience in five top business schools of France: HEC, ESSEC, ESCP, GEM, and EMLV, and active participation in structuring and developing course syllabuses, lectures, exercises and pedagogical supports, enables me to call myself a devoted and professional lecturer. Thanks to my intensive two years as a professor, I have developed my own teaching style and learned to handle computer-mediated communication with the students via electronic learning systems such as Brightspace.
​
My teaching experience stems from a variety of settings and audiences. I have interfaced with homogeneous groups with a passive learning style, and highly motivated MIB, BBA and MBA candidates who are eager to share their opinions and self-confident and professional managers with seven to fifteen years of experience. These diverse audiences have described me in their evaluations as a “highly motivated and interested professor” even for the courses that could be challenging in content.
​
I come from a country in which teaching is understood as a monologue given by a knowledgeable figure placed at the cathedra of a grandiose amphitheater where sound hardly reaches its furthest corners. This style of teaching does not welcome criticism, questioning or debate. Rather, it is designed to deliver certain information and then evaluate students’ mastery of it. Although I succeeded in teaching under this system, my own teaching philosophy is the contrary. I believe that Academia owes a debt to society for its liberty from the process of production, and that the most immediate way to repay this debt is to teach critical thinking. Hence, I attempt to apply interactive teaching methodologies, employ videos, case studies, role-play, psychological tests, scholarly articles and real-life experiences to support my delivery methods and ignite discussions with diverse student populations. I enjoy interacting with students in class and engage them in learning by doing to ensure quality teaching.
​