Aida Papikyan has majored in Cultural Studies at Yerevan State University. Her academic interests in Cultural Anthropology include formal and non-formal regulations of power institutions in Armenia, such as the modern army and police, as well as repressions in Soviet Armenia. She worked as a researcher in the Hazarashen Armenian Center for Ethnological studies in the frame of the Armenia Total(itar)is project between 2015 and 2018. In the scope of that project, she has taken part in the development of the electronic database of the victims of political repressions in Soviet Armenia and Soviet Georgia based on the archival documents of the National Archives of Armenia and the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Georgia and in the organization of the exhibition, named “Anti-Soviets”, held in 2017.