Knowledge

Here you can find links on academic articles, books, research and analytics. They can be useful for journalists, researchers and activists digging into the topic.

"Childbirth Is Not A Car Rental": Mothers And Obstetricians Negotiating Choice And Relationships In Russian Commercial Maternity Care

Author:
Anna Temkina

This article explores how commercialization of maternity care in Russia offers new opportunities and imposes new limitations on both mothers-tobe and doctors. The research is based on 35 in-depth interviews with patients and 24 with professionals in paid maternity car in St. Petersburg (2015–2017). It is a significant and illustrative case within the broader trends in the Russian health care system of the 2000s–2010s. This article’s contribution is an understanding of maternity care’s post-socialism market development from the perspective of women: mothers-to-be and mostly female doctors. The ongoing reforms and organization of paid maternity care in Russia are analyzed. I explore the position of mothers-to-be as consumers with growing demands, and of professional women as they respond to such demands. I depict how doctors, though improving their economic and working conditions, resist the symbolic decline of their status and seek to restore their power, and how mothers-to-be accept doctors’
authoritative role in highly medicalized maternity care.

Materials of the V International Gender Workshop “Gender and (Military) Conflicts in Easter-European Countries through Feminist Lenses”

On March 8-10, 2017 in Lviv, the V International Gender Workshop took place organized by Heinrich Boell Office in Ukraine in cooperation with hbs offices in Eastern European countries and the Caucasus. Researchers and activists from Ukraine, Belarus, Russia, Georgia, Armenia, Poland, Macedonia, Serbia, Czech Republic and Germany discussed military conflict situations in the region from the perspective of feminist critique. This publication collects texts created on the basis of some of the presentations from the event.

"Prostitutes" and "Defectors": How the Ukrainian State Constructs Women Emigrants to Italy and the USA

Author:
Cinzia Solari

Scholars of sending countries emphasise the role of economics in shaping state policies towards emigration. They argue sending states are converging around a set of discursive strategies that aim to facilitate the influx of remittances from emigrants. One such strategy uses discourses of cultural nationalism to celebrate emigrants as ‘heroes’ of the nation. Drawing on a state sponsored media campaign and ethnographic data, I found the Ukrainian state does the opposite. It stigmatises its emigrants to both Italy and the USA as ‘prostitutes’ and ‘defectors’ respectively. However emigrants are differentially stigmatised. Emigrants to the USA are simply dismissed, but the Ukrainian state constructs migration to Italy as a shameful social problem. It does this even though emigrants to Italy send back significantly more remittances. Economic interests cannot explain Ukrainian state practices towards emigration. Instead, in the context of post-Soviet transformation, I suggest the Ukrainian state has prioritised the construction of a national identity. The state then constructs policy with an eye to cultural rather than economic outcomes. I argue the Ukrainian state actively stigmatises the migration to Italy because it poses challenges to the nation-building process, whereas the migration to the USA is peripheral to this key state concern.

Crisis, War and Austerity: Devaluation of Female Labor and Retreating of the State

Author:
Oksana Dutchak

Following the Euromaidan, the outbreak of war and ensuing economic crisis, the Ukrainian government introduced wide-ranging reforms guided by the neoliberal idea that stability and economic growth can be generated by cutting social spending.

Despite the government’s proclaimed intent to support the poorest and weakest members of Ukrainian society, the opposite has occurred, and the negative effects of the new reforms have ended up targeting them most. Women in Ukraine are particularly harshly hit by these savings measures. Despite superficially pro-women legislation, women tend to have the opposite experience. Cuts to the civil service and social spending generally lead to lay-offs and thus to the firing of women, who overwhelmingly work in these sectors.

Further consequences of Ukrainian austerity policies are, among others, an ongoing devaluing of reproductive labour (care, education, etc.), the dismantling of social infrastructure and a neoliberal, profit-oriented restructuring of the education and health care systems.

The Ukrainian left is faced with the challenge of fundamentally criticizing these processes and articulating alternatives. Left-wing feminists must build a strong network of allies in order to lead the fightback.​

Gender and Choice After Socialism

Author:
Editors Attwood, L., Schimpfossl, E. and Yusupova, M.

The end of socialism in the Soviet Union and its satellite states ushered in a new era of choice. Yet the idea that people are really free to live as they choose turns out to be problematic.  Personal choice is limited by a range of factors such as a person’s economic situation, class, age, government policies and social expectations, especially regarding  gender roles. Furthermore, the notion of free choice is a crucial feature of capitalist ideology, and can be manipulated in the interests of the market. This edited collection explores the complexity of choice in Russia and Ukraine. The contributors explore how the new choices available to people after the collapse of the Soviet Union have interacted with and influenced gender identities and gender, and how choice has become one of the driving forces of class-formation in countries which were, in the Soviet era, supposedly classless.

Делай сам/а: практики низовых гражданских инициатив

Книга рассказывает о том, как на постсоветском пространстве зарождаются, претворяются в жизнь и развиваются идеи, исходящие непосредственно от людей, готовых брать на себя ответственность за жизнь в своих сообществах и городах и имеющих представление о том, как и в каком обществе они хотят жить.

Собранные в книге истории отражают реальный опыт людей, которые смогли объединиться для совместного решения той или иной проблемы. В каждой главе вы найдете подробные описания низовых инициатив и интервью с их создателями. Книга полезна как для опытных активистов, так и для тех, кто только планирует реализацию или уже работает над созданием или развитием собственного проекта, а также для всех, кто просто интересуется тем, как устроено общество.

Non-territorial spaces of Belarusian political nomadism

Author:
Viktorija Rusinaitė

In Belarus the state systematically hinders the development of civil society. NGOs have difficulties registering, functioning and sustaining their organisations. Some individuals related to the civil sector are persecuted, fined, imprisoned. Therefore a number of NGOs are registered abroad and civil society activists move with them to continue their work on Belarusian issues. In this article we aim to define people who left Belarus in order to work for Belarus as Belarusian Political Nomads, using the notion of transnational subjectivity to explore their migration strategies.