Meeting with Ioulia Shukan
Moderated by:
- Iryna Dmytrychyn, Senior Lecturer and Head of Ukrainian Studies (CREE, Inalco)
Book presentation
In April 2014, when the war in eastern Ukraine, also known as the Donbass War, which pits the Ukrainian government against Russia and its local separatist proxies, the Kharkiv medical-military hospital becomes one of the main facilities for the care of military wounded, in a context where the chronic underfunding of the Ukrainian army has a strong impact even on its hospitals. At the end of a nine-year ethnographic study, Ioulia Shukan takes us on a journey of commitment and citizenship through the lives of seven women with very different profiles who chose to become volunteers at this hospital. In addition to collecting donations from the Ukrainian population, they devote several hours a week to caring for the wounded, providing them with logistical and psychological support. With no medical training and no experience of collective action, they reinvent the forms of interpersonal solidarity and civic action on a daily basis. Their commitment, however, came at the expense of their former social positions and sociabilities, even if it meant marginalizing them and making them feel insecure, gradually locking them into this long-term volunteer role against a backdrop of lasting stalemate in the war, culminating in Russia's large-scale military invasion of the Ukraine. In this way, Ioulia Shukan's reconstruction of the manufacture of the common around care for the wounded explains how Ukrainian society has functioned and the solidity of the social ties that sustain it in the face of adversity since 2014 and right up to the present day.
Author biography
Ioulia Shukan is Director of Studies at the EHESS, attached to the Center for Russian, Caucasian, East European and Central Asian Studies (CERCEC). Her research focuses on citizen solidarity, particularly among women, during the Maïdan (2013-2014) and the Donbass war (2014-2022). Since the 2022 invasion, her research questions the link between war, solidarities and the care of war amputations, thereby exploring the global issues of constructing care and reinventing solidarities in the face of disability in extreme times.
"Ukrainian Library"
This cycle aims to reflect Ukrainian current affairs in the broadest sense, through recent publications dedicated to or affecting Ukraine.
Organizer
- Iryna Dmytrychyn (CREE, Inalco)