April 2024 – Gender and Transformation in Central-Eastern Europe and Eurasia Workshop

A Feminist Response to the War in Ukraine: Vlada Nedak in conversation with Janet Elise Johnson

Friday May 3 2pm to 3pm

Vlada Nedak

CEO of Project Kesher Ukraine and the Women’s Opportunity Fund of Ukraine

In person at CUNY Graduate Center
(room 5203, Ralph Bunche Institute)

and Zoom

Vlada Nedak is the CEO of Project Kesher Ukraine and the Women’s Opportunity Fund of Ukraine, which she founded in 2022. During her 20 years of leadership, she has been active in building Jewish life in Ukraine, developing a network of women community leaders, and building partnerships with women’s NGOs and other national and religious organizations. Some of her accomplishments include: designing and implementing the first women’s health programming on Hromadske (Ukrainian public) radio; commissioning and overseeing the creation of a year of Jewish holiday celebrations in Ukrainian, including the first Ukrainian-language haggadah; and administering over a million dollars of humanitarian aid for women and children in the past year. Vlada is a graduate of Kryvyi Rih State Pedagogical University, and earned her MBA from Lviv Business School of Ukraine Catholic University where her work was recognized with a 2023 Alumni of the Year award.

in conversation with Janet Elise Johnson, Endowed Chair in Women’s and Gender Studies, Brooklyn College, City University New York, and Professor, Political Science & Women’s/Gender Studies, Brooklyn College and CUNY Graduate Center

Discussion format: For this session, there is no paper to read in advance. We ask that participants come with questions, including about what we as feminists can do to support feminist work in Ukraine. At the workshop, Dr. Johnson will pose a series of questions to Ms. Nedak, after which we invite discussion with the in-person and online audience.

Seditious Bodies: The Subversive Aesthetics of Vulnerability in East European Feminist Performances

Aniko Szucs

(Queen’s College, CUNY)

Friday April 12 2024

2pm to 3pm (New York Time)

In person at CUNY Graduate Center CUNY Graduate Center (room 5203, Ralph Bunche Institute)

and Zoom

Workshop format: We ask that participants read the paper in advance. At the workshop, Dr. Szucs will give a brief presentation, after which we invite discussion with the in-person and online audience.

Aniko Szucs is a theater and performance studies scholar, dramaturg, and curator. She is an assistant professor in the Department of Drama, Theater, and Dance at Queens College. Dr. Szucs completed her Ph.D. in Performance Studies at New York University and earned an M.F.A. in Dramaturgy from the University of Theater and Film Arts in Budapest. She has worked as a resident and a production dramaturg in theaters across the US and Hungary. Dr. Szucs’s research interests include Central and East European political theater, feminist protest movements and performances, politics of memory, and the genealogy and critique of state surveillance.

Abstract:

Seditious Bodies: The Subversive Aesthetics of Vulnerability in East European Feminist Performances

In the recent transnational crisis of neoliberal austerity and rising neo-authoritarianism, there has been increased scholarly attention placed on forms of cultural resistance and social protest that—through performative gestures—foreground bodily vulnerability, mobilizing it as a site of connection and potentiality. Vulnerability, in this context, is a socio-political predicament that is perceived as a condition of resistance. This talk, however, considers vulnerability as an affective-aesthetic quality that distinctively characterizes contemporary East European feminist performances. Building on the genealogy of feminist body art and theory of the region, performance artists Maria Kulikovska (Ukraine) and Mikolt Tózsa (Hungary) yet again turn the female body and feminine corporeality into a vehicle of feminist resistance. The vulnerable body at the center of these performances is not merely a product of the precarious social and material conditions but a matrix of affective forces, symbolic gestures, and performative routines, one that liberates the artists from the ontological precarity of their existence.