Disability and Disability Rights in Ukraine

I am currently completing a long-term research project on the politics and poetics of disability in postsocialist Ukraine.  The project focuses on persons with mobility disabilities (i.e. wheelchair users) as a group that has recently been targeted by a range of state and international interventions.  Part of this research includes documenting the history of the disability rights movement in the former Soviet Union from the 1960s to the present.  As part of this investigation, for the past decade I have followed the activities of several disability rights organizations in Ukraine.  I have been especially interested to investigate how international interventions into the disability rights arena have shaped the empowerment strategies taken up by Ukrainian advocacy NGOs, and the factors that contribute to the success or failure of these “imported” agendas.  Also, through participant observation and personal interviews, I follow the development of new disability identities (or the rejection of a disability identity) as persons and groups accesses different narratives of and strategies for empowerment.  I focus especially on issues pertaining to the lived experience of disability after socialism, including the ways that disability intersects with other trajectories of identity, especially class, gender, and ethnicity. 

I am writing a book based on this research, and several articles will appear soon in edited volumes.  These articles focus on disability and masculinity in post-Soviet Ukraine; disability, structural violence, and health; and disability rights in new EU states and candidate countries (Bulgaria, Romania, Croatia, and the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia).

Link to my publications on Disability and Disability Rights in Ukraine.

Women and Civil Society in post-Soviet Ukraine

During 1998-2003, I conducted ethnographic fieldwork in Ukraine on gender and class differentiation in Ukrainian civil society.  This is the focus of my first book, Women’s Social Activism in the New Ukraine: Development and the Politics of Differentiation (2008, Indiana U Press).  In this ethnography of the lives of eleven women NGO leaders in Kyiv (whom I followed over a two-year period during 1998-99), I examine the unexpected and ambiguous effects that social activism has produced for Ukraine’s women as they take up the “housework of politics.”  In Ukraine, as men have dominated in positions of political power, in the face of social welfare reform and the scaling back of the social safety net, it is women who have been left as leaders of service-oriented NGOs and mutual aid associations to care for the marginalized and destitute, with little or no support from the Ukrainian state.  This calls into question the supposed “empowering” effects of NGO activism, and also reveals how entire categories of people (the elderly, large families) are falling through the cracks in the new Ukraine. 

In this work I use the notion of “differentiation” (an indigenous term in Ukraine that drives social politics reforms) to explain and track the sharpening of social inequalities after socialism.  These women’s lives and the stories they tell reveal the NGO sector to be a key site for postsocialist differentiation of citizens, as criteria for productive citizenship are reworked, and the rights and needs of various categories of citizens redefined.  Yet even as some activists and their constituents have been ignored by the state and development programs and left to fend for themselves, other women NGO leaders have been able to propel themselves into prestigious careers in business and government.  These women have succeeded in tapping into lucrative social networks, and they have also taken up powerful neoliberal narratives of self-sufficiency, development, and self-realization to understand and construct themselves as a new kind of postsocialist subject.  I delineate three major sites of differentiation: state rhetoric and especially welfare policy; international development programs and NGOs; and differentiation as an interpersonal phenomenon driven by peoples’ changing perceptions of their own personal and social worth and that of others.  By placing informants’ experiences in the broader context of social change, social welfare reform, and international development programs, I investigate the intertwining processes of differentiation as certain types of claims, organizations, and NGO leaders are privileged over others, sharpening social inequalities in post-Soviet Ukraine.             

Link to my publications on Women and Civil Society in post-Soviet Ukraine.

Ukrainian Folk Medicine

During the summers of 1998 and 1999 I took part in an ethnographic expedition down the Dnistr River in rural Western Ukraine to interview elderly women folk healers known as “babky.”  These healers perform rituals such as vylyvaty visk, or the pouring forth of wax, to treat maladies that elude the expertise of local doctors (fear, curses, the evil eye).  I produced an ethnographic video based on this work entitled “Shapes in the Wax: Tradition and Faith among Folk Medicine Practitioners in Rural Ukraine” (2004).  In the video the healers demonstrate their rituals and reflect on their lives as elders, healers, and women in Ukraine.  Besides introducing these folk medicine rituals, “Shapes in the Wax” is a useful tool to introduce students to ethnographic research methods and fundamental concepts in medical anthropology. 

Article about "Shapes in the Wax"
Link to my publications on Ukrainian Folk Medicine.

Health and Healing after Chernobyl

During 1998-99 I also researched the various practices of “alternative” medicine that have become pervasive in post-Soviet Ukraine.  Interest in non-invasive, “natural” modes of healing became especially popular after the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear catastrophe.  One particularly interesting strategy for maintaining health after Chernobyl is the use of substances known as “radioprotectors” to flush radioactive particles from the organism.  I have found that using radioprotectors allows persons to establish particular class identities in the invention of their postsocialist, post-Chernobyl selves.  The case of radioprotectors also shows the uncertaintly people feel in making health-related decisions in the context of the new market economy. 

Link to my publications on Health and Healing after Chernobyl.
Link to the Chernobyl Research Page.