Mirjam Büdenbender is a doctoral candidate at KU Leuven. Her research is part of the ERC funded project on the ‘Real Estate/Financial Complex’, which investigates the linkages between real estate markets and financial practices in contemporary capitalist societies. Mirjam studies the case of Russia and Poland. In so doing, she explicitly addresses the relationship between real estate and modern financial practices as well as their differential construction in post-socialist societies.