Disability and Mobile Citizenship in Postsocialist Ukraine (Indiana University Press, 2011) examines the struggles of disabled persons in the former Soviet states to secure their rights during the tumultuous political, economic and social reforms of the last two decades. Through participant observation and interviews with disabled Ukrainians from all walks of life—rights activists, politicians, students, workers, entrepreneurs, athletes, and others—Phillips documents the creative strategies used by people on the margins of postsocialist societies to assert claims to what she calls mobile citizenship. The author draws on this rich ethnographic material to argue for public storytelling as a powerful means to expand notions of relatedness, kinship, and social responsibility to shape a more tolerant and inclusive society in postsocialist states like Ukraine.
Women's Social Activism in the New Ukraine: Development and the Politics of Differentiation (Indiana University Press, 2008)
“Democratization, privatization, and women's lives in postsocialist Ukraine”
In postsocialist Ukraine, with privatization and the scaling back of the social safety net, it is primarily women who have been left as leaders of service-oriented NGOs and mutual aid associations, caring for the marginalized and destitute with little or no support from the Ukrainian state. Sarah D. Phillips follows 11 activists over the course of several years to document the unexpected effects that social activism has produced for women: increasing social inequality and "differentiation" in the form of new cultural criteria for productive citizenship and new definitions of the rights and needs of various categories of citizens.
"Shapes in the Wax," Ethnographic Video
In the late 1990s, I traveled around rural Western Ukraine to study the practices of elderly women folk healers known as “babky.” The result of this research is an ethnographic video, “Shapes in the Wax: Tradition and Faith among Folk Medicine Practitioners in Rural Ukraine” (2004) in which the healers demonstrate their rituals and reflect on their lives as elders, healers, and women in Ukraine. For more information on this project, see my "Research" section.
I am editor of the Anthropology of East Europe Review (AEER), a biannual edited journal of scholarship on Eastern Europe, Russia, the Balkans, and Central Asia. Our mission is to showcase fresh, up-to-date research and to help build a community of scholars who focus on the region. The journal’s content is now freely available on the Internet through the Open Journal System (OJS): http://scholarworks.iu.edu/journals/index.php/aeer
I am also a member of the editorial board of Disability Studies Quarterly, the journal of the Society for Disability Studies (SDS). It is a multidisciplinary and international journal of interest to social scientists, scholars in the humanities, disability rights advocates, creative writers, and others concerned with the issues of people with disabilities: http://www.dsq-sds.org/index
I also teach and conduct research in a number of areas including:Medical Anthropology; Central and Eastern Europe; the Former Soviet Union, especially Ukraine and Russia; postsocialist transformations; civil society and non-governmental organizations (NGOs); globalization; development; gender studies; post-Chernobyl health and healing; folk medicine; and disability studies.
