Readings on Ukraine

On the third anniversary of the start of the war in Ukraine, in solidarity and in an effort to deepen knowledge in social and cultural history of Ukraine, we are offering free access to these relevant journal articles and book chapters that focus on social and historical issues in Ukraine.


Carnage and Care on the Eastern Front: The War Diaries of Bernhard Bardach, 1914-1918
Bernhard Bardach
Translated and Edited by Peter C. Appelbaum

[A] significant historical document and much-welcomed source for scholars of the military, social, and material history of World War I. It is also a valuable record for everyone interested in the history of war on the territories of present-day Ukraine and the eastern front in general […] • Harvard Ukrainian Studies


Resettlers and Survivors: Bukovina and the Politics of Belonging in West Germany and Israel, 1945–1989
Gaëlle Fisher

Located on the border of present-day Romania and Ukraine, the historical region of Bukovina was the site of widespread displacement and violence as it passed from Romanian to Soviet hands and back again during World War II. This study focuses on two groups of “Bukovinians”—ethnic Germans and German-speaking Jews—as they navigated dramatically changed political and social circumstances in and after 1945. Through comparisons of the narratives and self-conceptions of these groups, this book gives a nuanced account of how they dealt with the difficult legacies of World War II, while exploring Bukovina’s significance for them as both a geographical location and a “place of memory.”


New Imaginaries: Youthful Reinvention of Ukraine’s Cultural Paradigm
Edited and Translated by Marian J. Rubchak

Having been spared the constraints imposed on intellectual discourse by the totalitarian regime of the past, young Ukrainian scholars now engage with many Western ideological theories and practices in an atmosphere of intellectual freedom and uncensored scholarship. Displacing the Soviet legacy of prescribed thought and practices, this volume’s female contributors have infused their work with Western elements, although vestiges of Soviet-style ideas, research methodology, and writing linger. The result is the articulation of a “New Imaginaries” — neither Soviet nor Western — that offers a unique approach to the study of gender by presenting a portrait of Ukrainian society as seen through the eyes of a new generation of feminist scholars.


De-Commemoration: Removing Statues and Renaming Places
Edited by Sarah Gensburger and Jenny Wüstenberg

“[A]n inspirational collection of diverse approaches, practices, methods, and perspectives of de-commemoration of forgoing heroes and activities, set in various cultural and geographical contexts. This is an exceedingly rare and truly global contribution.” • Mariusz Czepczyński, University of Gdańsk

  • Additional Recommendation: Chapter 7. Contrasting Fates of Lenin Statues in Ukraine and Russia by Dominique Colas

Memory and Change in Europe: Eastern Perspectives
Edited by Małgorzata Pakier and Joanna Wawrzyniak

In studies of a common European past, there is a significant lack of scholarship on the former Eastern Bloc countries. While understanding the importance of shifting the focus of European memory eastward, contributors to this volume avoid the trap of Eastern European exceptionalism, an assumption that this region’s experiences are too unique to render them comparable to the rest of Europe. They offer a reflection on memory from an Eastern European historical perspective, one that can be measured against, or applied to, historical experience in other parts of Europe. In this way, the authors situate studies on memory in Eastern Europe within the broader debate on European memory.


Topographies of Suffering: Buchenwald, Babi Yar, Lidice
Jessica Rapson

Commentary on memorials to the Holocaust has been plagued with a sense of “monument fatigue”, a feeling that landscape settings and national spaces provide little opportunity for meaningful engagement between present visitors and past victims. This book examines the Holocaust via three sites of murder by the Nazis: the former concentration camp at Buchenwald, Germany; the mass grave at Babi Yar, Ukraine; and the razed village of Lidice, Czech Republic. Bringing together recent scholarship from cultural memory and cultural geography, the author focuses on the way these violent histories are remembered, allowing these sites to emerge as dynamic transcultural landscapes of encounter in which difficult pasts can be represented and comprehended in the present. This leads to an examination of the role of the environment, or, more particularly, the ways in which the natural environment, co-opted in the process of killing, becomes a medium for remembrance.


Mapping Difference: The Many Faces of Women in Contemporary Ukraine
Edited by Marian J. Rubchak

Drawn from various disciplines and a broad spectrum of research interests, these essays reflect on the challenging issues confronting women in Ukraine today. The contributors are an interdisciplinary, transnational group of scholars from gender studies, feminist theory, history, anthropology, sociology, women’s studies, and literature. Among the issues they address are: the impact of migration, education, early socialization of gender roles, the role of the media in perpetuating and shaping negative stereotypes, the gendered nature of language, women and the media, literature by women, and local appropriation of gender and feminist theory. Each author offers a fresh and unique perspective on the current process of survival strategies and postcommunist identity reconstruction among Ukrainian women in their current climate of patriarchalism.


Journal Articles

Berghahn Journals is offering free access to the following relevant articles.

ANTHROPOLOGICAL JOURNAL OF EUROPEAN CULTURES

Geopolitical Transition of the European Body in Ukraine
Nadzeya Husakouskaya (Vol. 28, Issue 1)
DOI: 10.3167/ajec.2019.280110

Open Access!
ASPASIA

Love and Sex in Wartime: Controlling Women’s Sexuality in the Ukrainian Nationalist Underground
Marta Havryshko (Vol. 12)
DOI: 10.3167/asp.2018.120103

FOCAAL

Underground waterlines: Explaining political quiescence of Ukrainian labor unions
Denys Gorbach (Vol. 2019, Issue 84)
DOI: 10.3167/fcl.2019.840103

GERMAN POLITICS AND SOCIETY

The Ampel Coalition’s Foreign Policy Challenges
Jack Janes (Vol. 40, Issue 4)
DOI: 10.3167/gps.2022.400405

Inertia and Reactiveness in Germany’s Russia Policy: From the 2021 Federal Election to the Invasion of Ukraine in 2022
Jonas J. Driedger (Vol. 40, Issue 4)
DOI: 10.3167/gps.2022.400407

THE INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF SOCIAL QUALITY

Special Issue: A Thematic Issue about Central and Eastern European Societies (Vol. 10, Issue 2)

Social Quality in a Transitive Society: The Role of the State
Valeriy Heyets (Vol. 9, Issue 1)
DOI: 10.3167/IJSQ.2019.090103

Four Dimensions of Societal Transformation: An Introduction to the Problematique of Ukraine
Zuzana Novakova (Vol. 7, Issue 2)
DOI: 10.3167/IJSQ.2017.070202

LEARNING AND TEACHING

Global inequality and policy selectivity in the periphery: The case of Ukrainian reforms in higher education
Viktoriia Muliavka (Vol. 12, Issue 1)
DOI: 10.3167/latiss.2019.120104

REGIONS AND COHESION

The Ukrainian divide: The power of historical narratives, imagined communities, and collective memories
Alina Penkala, Ilse Derluyn, and Ine Lietaert (Vol. 10, Issue 3)
DOI: 10.3167/reco.2020.100311

SOCIAL ANTHROPOLOGY/ANTHROPOLOGIE SOCIALE

Liberalism in fragments: Oligarchy and the liberal subject in Ukrainian news journalism
Taras Fedirko (Vol. 29, Issue 2)
DOI: 10.1111/1469-8676.13063


Remembering Forgetting: A Monument to Erasure at the University of North Carolina

by Timothy J. McMillan

The following essay originally appeared in Silence, Screen and Spectacle: Rethinking Social Memory in the Age of Information. This book is now available in paperback.

In 2001, I began teaching a first-year seminar titled “Defining Blackness.” My journey with that class and its descendants is intertwined with my relationship with the memorial landscape, concrete and virtual, of the campus of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. In its initial year, the class decided to take as its focus the idea of how blackness, specifically American blackness, might mediate and alter how people experience the physical campus. In class discussions we surmised that there is a segregation of knowledge and of perception that might become manifest by examining the memorial landscape and that there are aspects of the campus that might be invisible to some but highly charged to others. Continue reading “Remembering Forgetting: A Monument to Erasure at the University of North Carolina”

Recreating universities to help revive democracy

The following is a post by Davydd J. Greenwood, Goldwin Smith Professor of Anthropology Emeritus, Cornell University

The following are some management verities that abound in current university administrations:

  • Good universities require highly-paid leaders hired by Boards of Trustees through executive search services.
  • Good universities have large administrative staffs, often outnumbering the faculty.
  • Good university leaders must impose accountability and quality control to make their university rise in the rankings.
  • The cost of higher education will always go up.

All these verities are false as a single example can show. The Mondragón University in the Basque Country with 4,000 students and 4 colleges operating 8 campus locations throughout the Basque Country has a central administrative staff of 3 senior administrators and their secretaries. Highly ranked and successful, it operates daily through collaborative governance including the students, faculty, and staff who “run” the university. If this is possible, then having more managers than workers, having vast administrative overheads, and governing from the apex by imposed authority, are not laws of nature. Mondragón University shows that a successful university business model can be unlike any of our currently over-administered and radically inefficient universities. In science, an exception to the rule demonstrates that the rule is false.

Most explanations of the decline and fall of public higher education blame the corporatization of our institutions and implementation of business models for the problems. First-hand knowledge of innovative private sector organizations show they share more features with Mondragón University than with our current universities.

Successful businesses do not resemble our current universities. These institutions are poorly organized, over-staffed with administrators, and suffer from huge pay disparities and runaway costs. Successful businesses generally are team-based matrix organizations whose cross-disciplinary, cross-functional teams focus on products or key processes. Each team has experts from all relevant stakeholder/functional areas in the organization. The business leaders are coordinators and process champions, not authoritarian bosses. Salary differentials are generally modest. In these well-run organizations, the people who produce the “value” for the organization play a role in structuring and managing operations.

This contrasts sharply with the administrative bloat in universities, the authoritarianism of “parachuted in” academic leaders, and salaries for senior academic administrators that often are 40-50 times higher than those of the secretarial staff and groundskeepers. The power apex is remote from daily work processes and thus leaders cannot make competent management decisions. Nor can they understand why their decisions fail to produce the desired results. Failure instead is blamed on the faculty and the students. Ultimately, these policies prevent working and middle class students from having a high-quality education and gaining the consequent social mobility and civic awareness it can produce.

We are reaching the nadir in this race to the bottom. The only way forward is to create higher education anew through the democratic practices of participatory democracy, as in the Mondragón University. These practices are the core of Action Research. They require all the relevant stakeholders to collaborate in establishing the mission, structures, and practices of the institution. Together they must enact these missions and keep constant evaluation processes going to see how well they are accomplishing the goals they agreed on, making the necessary adjustments to improve on a continuing basis.

The “freedom to teach” and the “freedom to learn” essential to Bildung involves the ongoing recreation and reinforcement of universities that respect and practice academic freedom, academic integrity, and participatory democracy in every organizational dimension. These recreated universities would be schools for democracy and organized to produce Neue-Bildung for the university stakeholders and for society at large.

Critique and wringing of hands is easy; action research to create democratic universities is not. Where a powerful few currently dominate, they will react to any threat to their power and money and fight back. Changing universities into such organizations requires radical moves, the first being understanding that such change is possible. We have laid out the analysis and needed actions in our book, Creating a New Public University and Reviving Democracy: Action Research in Higher Education.

The current quagmires created by the neo-liberals in universities (and most other institutions) offers some hope. Most of the stakeholders, regardless of their politics, are aware that the current university system is broken. What matters now is to have concrete plans for a way out of the quagmire and to be ready for an arduous campaign to recreate universities, an essential element in the rebirth of democracy itself.

 


 

Learn more about Davydd J. Greenwood’s new book Creating a New Public University and Reviving Democracy: Action Research in Higher Education here.

Words Matter: ‘Race’ in American Campaign Rhetoric

by Augustine Agwuele.

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Augustine Agwuele is the author of the article “Culture Trumps Scientific Fact: ‘Race’ in US American Language” appearing in Volume: 60 Issue: 2 of Social Analysis: The International Journal of Social and Cultural Practice.


Momma she send me to school, I get educated

I get educated, so sophisticated

Not under-rated but really elevated

West African youths quickly appropriated this 1983 lyrical refrain of Eek-a-Mus as it aligns with the singular message about education flogged into them since kindergarten. Education liberates, elevates, promotes, empowers, and places one on a distinguished pedestal. Continue reading “Words Matter: ‘Race’ in American Campaign Rhetoric”