Disability and Disability Rights in Ukraine

Several conference papers are available online:

“‘Survivor’ in Ukraine: Living Disability in a Post-Soviet State,” (presented at the symposium “Challenges, Choices and Context: Health Behaviors in Eastern Europe and Eurasia,” University of Texas, Austin, March 23-24, 2007).

“Disability and Citizenship in Post-Soviet Ukraine: An Anthropological Critique,” paper presented at the First Annual Danyliw Research Seminar in Contemporary Ukrainian Studies at the Chair of Ukrainian Studies, University of Ottawa, September 29-October 2, 2005.

Other articles on this work are also available online:

2009    “Civil Society and Disability Rights in Post-Soviet Ukraine: NGOs and Prospects for Change.” Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies 16(1):275-291. 

2009    “‘There Are No Invalids in the USSR!’ A Missing Soviet Chapter in the New Disability History.” Disability Studies Quarterly 29(3).  Available at http://www.dsq-sds.org/article/view/936/1111.

2006    “Parallel Worlds:  People with disabilities don’t need pity and charity. They need opportunities to live and work.” Korrespondent, December 2, 2006 (in Russian).

2002   “Living in a Parallel World: Disability in Post-Soviet Ukraine.” Russian and East European Center News (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) 100:1-2.

Women and Civil Society in post-Soviet Ukraine

2008    Women’s Social Activism in the New Ukraine: Development and the Politics of Differentiation.  Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 

2005 “Will the Market Set Them Free?  Women, NGOs, and Social Enterprise in Ukraine.” Human Organization 64(3):251-264.

2005 “Civil Society and Healing: Theorizing Women’s Social Activism in Post-Soviet Ukraine.”  Ethnos 70(4):489-514.

2004 “Women and Development in Postsocialism: Theory and Power East and West.” SouthernAnthropologist 30(1):19-37.

2000    “NGOs in Ukraine: The Makings of a Women’s Space?” The Anthropology of East Europe Review 18(2):23-29.

Ukrainian Folk Medicine

Ethnographic video

“Shapes in the Wax” can be ordered by contacting Sarah Phillips via email.

Companion articles to the video have been published in English and Ukrainian, and they may be found here:

2005    “Folk Medicine Rituals in Rural Western Ukraine: Babky-Sheptukhi.” Etnichna Istoria Narodiv Evropy (Ethnic History of Peoples of Europe) Vol. 20, pp. 107-116 (in Ukrainian).

2004. “Waxing Like the Moon: Women Folk Healers in Rural Western Ukraine.” Folklorica 9(1):13-45. 

2001. “Shapes in the Wax: Babki-Sheptukhi (Folk Healers), Their Craft, and Their Roles in Ukrainian Village Society.” Kulturni Hrona Dnistra (Cultural Chronicles of the Dnister), ed. Valentin Stetsyk, pp. 55-69.  Ivano-Frankivs’k: Lileya (in Ukrainian).

 

Health and Healing after Chernobyl

My article on radioprotectors is available here:
 
2002. “Half-Lives and Healthy Bodies: Discourses on ‘Contaminated’ Foods and Healing in
Post-Chernobyl Ukraine.” Food and Foodways 10(1-2):27-53.

Other Chernobyl research includes my investigation of the symbolic fallout of Chernobyl.  I used ethnographic methods to analyze representations of Chernobyl in academic and popular discourse, literature, and museums, arguing that Chernobyl symbols serve as a set of resources: they produce memory, and they are the grounds for making a new society. 

See my article on Chernobyl symbolism:

2004. “Chernobyl’s Sixth Sense: The Symbolism of an Ever-Present Awareness.”  Anthropology and Humanism 29(2):159-185.