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Announcement

Mar. 28: Soloviova on women in Soviet Ukraine

Aliesia Soloviova

Visiting scholar at the Columbia University/PhD candidate at the European University Institute(Florence)

Soviet emancipation in Ukraine: the right to work a “double shift”

This presentation, drawn from a chapter of my doctoral dissertation, delves into the dual expectations of motherhood and labor imposed by Soviet policy in Ukraine, particularly from the 1950s until the collapse of the Soviet Union. I will explore the lived experiences of women who bore five or more children while working in difficult and hazardous jobs, as well as the challenges faced by single mothers during this era. Additionally, I will discuss the long-term effects of these dual responsibilities on post-Soviet Ukrainian society. By focusing on Soviet Ukraine, this research aims to contribute to the gradual development of the perception of the republics of the USSR as separate states with their own history and national identity, who once had been in an “arranged marriage”, but then lived “separately ever after”.

Aliesia Soloviova is a PhD student in history at the European University Institute, specializing in the study of marriage dynamics in Soviet Ukraine through archival research and qualitative analysis. Her work examines how state policies, social expectations, and individual experiences shaped marriage across different regions, drawing on personal testimonies, legal documents, and demographic records. Using data science methodologies, she integrates historical sources with computational tools to reveal patterns in Soviet marriage practices. In addition to her historical research, she holds a PhD in International Relations and a Master’s Degree in Data Science. 

Friday, Mar 28, 2-3PM via Zoom 

Register Here and receive the paper

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Announcement

Video recording of Feb. 25 talk: Ukraine and gender studies

Janet Elise Johnson’s talk from Feb. 25, 2025, Three Years of Full-Scale War: How Studying Ukraine can Change Gender Studies, is now available online at: https://youtu.be/xhTmopT18aM?si=PyeuBx9pECBseC0e

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Announcement

Spring 2025 Schedule

Most workshops meet on Fridays from 2pm to 3pm (New York time) with one special meeting in February

TUESDAY FEBRUARY 25 Special event

 Brooklyn College Endowed Chair in Women’s and Gender Studies talk

Janet Elise Johnson

Professor, Political Science, Brooklyn College and CUNY Graduate Center; Endowed Chair, Women’s and Gender Studies, Brooklyn College

Three Years of Full-Scale War:

How Studying Ukraine can Change Gender Studies

11am to 12:15pm

Woody Tanger Auditorium, Brooklyn College Library 

And on Zoom

Register Here

FRIDAY MARCH 28

Aliesia Soloviova

Ph.D. Candidate, European University Institute

Soviet Emancipation in Ukraine: The Right to Work a “Double Shift”

2pm to 3pm on Zoom

Register Here

FRIDAY APRIL 25

Iuliia Anosova

Postdoctoral Fellow, Human Rights Centre, Ghent University; legal expert, NGO La Strada-Ukraine

(In)visible Crime: Exploring the Changing Landscape of Policy and Justice Approaches to Conflict-Related Sexual Violence in Ukraine

2pm to 3pm

In Person at CUNY Graduate Center and on Zoom

Register Here

FRIDAY MAY 16

Olivera Jokić

Associate Professor, English and Gender Studies, John Jay College,  CUNY

From Unlettered Women: Documenting Socialism’s Working Class Women Migrants

2pm to 3pm 

In Person at CUNY Graduate Center and on Zoom

Register here for Zoom

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Announcement Presentations Schedule

Feb. 25: Johnson on three years of full-scale war in Ukraine and gender studies

Special Event: Brooklyn College Endowed Chair in Women’s and Gender Studies talk

Three Years of Full-Scale War: How Studying Ukraine can Change Gender Studies

moderated by Mara Lazda, Bronx Community College

Tuesday, Feb. 25 11AM-12:15PM
Brooklyn College Library, Woody Tanger Auditorium, and zoom 

This lecture is a moment to reflect on the third-year anniversary of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine and to consider how studying Eastern Europe can change gender studies, including giving us insight into today’s other turmoils. Over the last four decades, gender studies has been transformed, moving from mostly the study of the West to taking the rest of the world seriously. Yet, still often invisible is this part of the world, the site of much mass violence, decades of state socialism, and one of the first places to be subsumed by right-wing anti-genderism. This lecture will reflect on key feminist issues today, such as reflexivity, intersectionality, decolonialism, and solidarity. 

Janet Elise Johnson is the Endowed Chair in Women’s and Gender Studies, Brooklyn College, 2023-2025, and Professor of Political Science, Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center, CUNY.  Her research focuses on gender, feminist activism, corruption, authoritarianism, and gendered violence in Russia and Ukraine. Her most recent book is The Routledge Handbook of Gender in Central-Eastern Europe and Eurasia (co-edited with Katalin Fábián and Mara Lazda, 2022), which won the 2022 Heldt prize for the best book from the Association for Women in Slavic Studies. Since 2008, she has been one of the coordinators of a monthly workshop on Gender and Transformation in Central-Eastern Europe and Eurasia now based at the CUNY Graduate Center.

To register for the Zoom

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Announcement Schedule

Friday December 6

2pm to 3pm (New York Time) on Zoom and in-person at the CUNY Graduate Center

Sandra Russell (Mt. Holyoke College)

Traveling Dreamwork: Black Feminist Epistemologies and Anticolonial Resistance in the Post-Soviet “Periphery”

Russia’s war against Ukraine has provoked recent, and somewhat contentious, dialogue around the question of race, whiteness, and colonialism in Eastern Europe. As race, gender, and sexuality have been mobilized in media discussions of the war, there has been an absence of nuance regarding the instability of these categories. Frequently taken for granted is the extent to which these identity categories form through political, social, and ideological conditions, reflecting and refracting the contexts through which they emerge. This conversation has become even more contentious given Israel’s brutal attacks on Gaza, wherein many leftist activist spaces have excluded the Ukrainian case from anticolonial resistance movements.

Such conceptualizations of race, gender, and sexuality quickly become monolithized in a Western political imagination, as is often the case with colonialist hegemonies. In my attempt to reckon with these urgent questions, I look to Audre Lorde’s 1976 “Notes from a Trip to Russia” as well as the USSR’s involvement in the “Free Angela Davis” movement (1971-72) as starting points to consider the translational, transmittable, and collaborative possibilities of Black feminist epistemologies and anticolonial and queer feminist movements in the peripheral contexts of the former Soviet Union—in Ukraine specifically, but also Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Georgia.

Dr. Sandra Joy Russell is a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Gender Studies at Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Massachusetts. Trained in Comparative Literature and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, her work explores the material and cultural expressions of gender, sexuality, and race in Ukraine, with a focus on the biopolitical entanglements of state and nation-building projects, as well as on contemporary queer, feminist, and anticolonial solidarities in the region.

Dr. Russell’s latest chapter, “‘Are These Guys Gay or Merely from Moscow?’: Homonationalism and Martyrology in Post-Soviet Ukrainian Literature” was published in the edited collection Queer Transnationalities in March 2023. Her forthcoming article, “‘She’s Our Fathers’ Daughter’: Angela Davis, Black American Subjectivity, and the Soviet Imaginary,” will be published in American Communist History next year. In addition to her research and teaching, she is also the Associate Editor of Ukraïnica: Ukraine’s Primary Database—an online catalogue of English Translations of Ukrainian Literature and Film supported by the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute.

To register for the workshop and to receive the paper, use this link

In-person: CUNY Graduate Center, 365 5th Avenue, New York room 5203, Ralph Bunche Institute

Questions? Mara Lazda ([email protected])

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Announcement Presentations

Anti-Gender Politics in Contemporary Poland and Beyond

with Professor Elżbieta Korolczuk

Södertörn University & American Studies Center, Warsaw University

Tuesday, November 19, 2024

11am to 12:15pm

Please join us for a special session of the Gender & Transformation workshop, sponsored by

Brooklyn College, Gender & Women’s Studies Program series, Feminist Futures: Studying Eastern Europe.

On Zoom, Registration Required, Here

In recent years patriarchal gender norms and ideologies have become an integral part of the right-wing populist parties programs. Right-wing leaders, including Jarosław Kaczyński, Victor Orban and Giorgia Melloni have invested in creating their image as defenders of traditional family and the nation against the excesses of what they call “gender ideology.” Such a stance have helped them to gain and sustain public support: in a 2019 opinion poll researchers asked about the biggest threats for Poland in the 21st century, and the majority of young men and older people declared that their biggest fear is the threat of the “gender ideology and LGBT movement.” In the Polish context, fighting against “gender ideology” has become a central objective of the right-wing coalition which came to power in2016. Anti-gender campaigns in the country have involved efforts to impose a total ban on abortion, assaults on LGBTQ rights, the demonization of ethnic minorities, and interventions in education and knowledge production.

Warszawa 15.07.2021 r. Agnieszka Graff i Elzbieta Korolczuk. fot.Krzysztof Zuczkowski

Elżbieta Korolczuk is an Associate professor in sociology, working at Södertörn University in Stockholm and at the American Studies Center, Warsaw University. Her research interests involve social movements, civil society and gender. She is currently engaged in a projectfunded by the Foundation for Baltic and East European Studies, which focuses on grassroots activism in the context of multiple crises in Central and Eastern Europe and Sweden (SUSTAIN ACTION), and studies feminist responses to anti-gender and anti-democratic forces in Horizon Europe project (CCINDLE). Her most recent publications include a co-authored volume co-edited Women’s Rebellion. Black Protests and Women’s Strikes, published by European Solidarity Centre in 2019 (with Beata Kowalska, Jennifer Ramme and Claudia Snochowska- Gonzalez) and a monograph co-authored with Agnieszka Graff Anti-gender Politics in the Populist Moment (Routledge 2021). Korolczuk is also longtime women’s and human rights activist and a commentator.

Sponsored also by Brooklyn College’s School of Humanities and Social Sciences; Departments of Anthropology, History, Judaic Studies, Modern Languages and Literatures, Philosophy, Political Science, Sociology;  and the Ethyle R. Wolfe Institute for the Humanities, Brooklyn Phi Beta Kappa Chapter, the Women’s Center, and the LGBTQ+ Resource Center

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Presentations

Friday October 18

Hybrid session: In-person and on Zoom

Gendering the Saeima: The Politics of Women’s Substantive Representation in Latvia

Laura Dean (Millikin University)

Does higher representation mean more feminist policies?

The 2018 parliamentary elections were a watershed year for women in Latvian politics. In this election, women’s descriptive representation increased from 19% to 31%, the largest increase since the re-establishment of independence

in 1991 with no gender quotas or institutional mechanisms for gender equality. Paxton and Hughes (2017), categorize this 12% increase as a big jump in women’s representation. This presentation, part of a larger book project, questions if the sharp increase in women’s descriptive representation corresponds to better substantive representation for women in Latvia. Using data from in-depth political ethnographic research in the Saeima (Latvian parliament), including participant observation and 44 interviews with female members of parliament, I examine substantive representation in the Latvian case. I use interviews to explore if women MPs believe they take women’s interests
into account in their daily parliamentary work. Then I compare this to differences in parliamentary voting patterns, bill sponsorship, and speeches.

Workshop format: We ask that participants read the paper in advance. At the workshop, Prof. Dean will give a short summary, after which participants are invited to ask questions based on the paper and presentation.

Use this link to register for the Zoom and to receive the paper

Join us in-person! CUNY Graduate Center, 365 5th Avenue, room 5203, Ralph Bunche Institute. Light refreshments and conversation after the talk.

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Presentations

Fall 2024 Schedule

We are excited to offer several hybrid sessions this semester. Please join us in person at the CUNY Graduate Center or on Zoom.

Friday September 13

2pm to 3pm (New York time) on Zoom

Vanja Petrović and Nađa Bobičić (University of Belgrade)

The Never-ending 90s in Serbia: What Came before the Phantasm of Gender

Register for Zoom link here

Friday October 18

2pm to 3pm (New York time) Hybrid in person and Zoom

Laura Dean (Millikin University)

Gendering the Saeima: The Politics of Women’s Substantive Representation in Latvia

Register for Zoom here

In-person address: CUNY Graduate Center, room 5203, Ralph Bunche Institute

Special zoom session and time: Tuesday November 19

11am to 12:15pm (New York Time)

Brooklyn College Endowed Chair in Women’s and Gender Studies Event

Elżbieta Korolczuk (Södertörn University & University of Warsaw)

Anti-Gender Politics in Contemporary Poland and Beyond

Register for Zoom link here.

Friday December 6

2pm to 3pm (New York time) Hybrid In-person and on Zoom

Sandra Russell (Mt. Holyoke College)

Traveling Dreamwork: Black Feminist Epistemologies and Anticolonial Resistance in the Post-Soviet “Periphery”

Register for Zoom here

In-person address: CUNY Graduate Center, room 5203, Ralph Bunche Institute

Categories
Announcement Presentations

Sept 13: Petrović and Bobičić on Anti-Genderism in Serbia

Join us Friday, September 13, 2pm to 3pm (New York Time) for our first meeting of the Fall 2024 semester, on Zoom, when we welcome

Vanja Petrović and Nađa Bobičić (University of Belgrade) on

The Never-ending 90s in Serbia: What Came before the Phantasm of Gender

Abstract: Many of the same conservative politicians, intellectuals and clergy members of the Serbian Orthodox Church have been dominating Serbia’s political landscape for the better part of the past 35 years and have played a central role in the formation of the local anti-gender movement. Here, we seek to contribute to the ongoing efforts of making sense of how and why anti-gender mobilization is making such steady headway in our society. Using archival documents, we map actors and showcase the ideological imaginary held by the conservative elite during the 1990s. We argue that this ideological imaginary serves as the foundation of anti-gender mobilizations today. As right-wing actors did not act in a vacuum, we also highlight the unwavering feminist and pacifist left-wing opposition.

Nađa Bobičić (PhD) is a literary critic, socialist feminist and queer ally who lives and works in the region of the former Yugoslavia. She has been the co-editor of several collective volumes on the topic of gender-based violence, including Non/violence and responsibility: between structure and culture(Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung Southeast Europe, 2020). Recently, she was a member of several research projects concerning unpaid housework, the position of women cultural workers in Serbia, and countering gender backlash in Serbia and Montenegro.   

Vanja Petrovic is an organizer, activist, and PhD candidate in social policy and social work at the University of Belgrade – Faculty of Political Science. Her research is interdisciplenary, spanning across gender studies, social policy, and ethnography. They are a founder of the Novi Sad Summer School for Abolition Feminism.  

Workshop format: We ask that participants read the paper in advance. At the workshop, the presenters will share a brief overview, followed by an open discussion. We invite participants to ask questions based on the paper and the discussion.

To register for the Zoom link and receive the paper use this link

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Announcement

Call for Papers 2024-2025

Founded in 1993, amidst the conflicts in Yugoslavia, this workshop is driven by the exploration of questions related to gender in postcommunist countries of East, South and Central Europe and the former Soviet Union, including the Baltic countries and Central Asia. Centered on debates on communism’s impact on women and gender and on how to converse and theorize across the East-West divide, this workshop strives to include voices from not just the New York City area, but also from the region and around the world. We continue to be an informal and friendly gathering for feminist scholars, activists, and journalists to discuss recent theoretical and/or critical work, empirical research, and critical and scholarly reflections on activism. 

Theme: We invite papers on any topic related to the themes of communism and postcommunism and gender, but this year, we are particularly p thinking about the impact of Russia’s long war against Ukraine and of the threat of anti-gender populism and authoritarianism. We remain especially interested in proposals that consider the impact of Russia’s aggression on gender in the region, state gendered violence inside and outside the state borders, and the role of state propaganda in fostering ultranationalism and war. We are also especially interested in reflecting on our work as scholars of gender and this region, including  the continued influence of Russia-centrism and West-based scholarship.  We welcome conversations that put this region in the context of global events and processes, including the Israel-Gaza war.

Details:

  • Meet monthly, usually on Fridays, at the CUNY Grad Center in New York City (with Zoom participation available) or via Zoom only, 2-3 PM New York time (8-9PM Poland time)
  • Presenters share a 10-15 page paper in advance to those who have registered. We ask authors to limit their presentation to 20 minutes to allow maximum time for conversation.
  • We will moderate the sessions so that we check in with what we are all thinking about, hear and see the key ideas of the paper, and have lots of time to discuss collaboratively.

To participate, please fill out this google form with your name, email, location/affiliation, current related interests.  We have also created a space there for you to share your thoughts and suggestions about the workshop as well as to indicate interest in participating in a NYC-based networking session to foster collaboration and mentoring.

If you’d like to present your work/project  this next academic year, please also add the following: 

  • tentative title for your talk
  • abstract of less than 200 words describing your proposed talk
  • up to 5 recent publications or information about your activism
  • your schedule clarifying which Fridays you could present
  • Preferred format: Zoom or in-person

We regret that, despite our best efforts, we do not have funds for an honorarium. All are welcome to participate.  We will start reviewing proposals on Aug. 1, 2024.

Warmly,

Janet Elise Johnson, Brooklyn College and Grad Center, City University of New York [email protected]

Mara Lazda, Bronx Community College, City University of New York [email protected]