BBUI Lecture Series: Constructing Eastern Europe. Geographies of Power in the 20th and 21st Centuries

Negotiating Protest Spaces on the Maidan

A Gender Perspective

The talk will focus on the gendered use of space during the Maidan protests in Ukraine. While women were certainly present at the Maidan, the space they occupied was often regimented by the male protesters. At the same time, the female protesters managed to find certain “pores” in the physical and ideological boundaries of the Maidan and succeeded in going beyond them, both in the process of challenging the patriarchal order and while obeying its rules. The talk will also look at the post-Maidan developments, paying particular attention to the participation of women in the military during the conflict in the Donbas region. The presentation will try to assess whether the active participation of women in the protest movements or in political violence foreshadows their liberation.

Olesya KHROMEYCHUK is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of East Anglia, where she teaches Soviet history and researches the participation and representation of women in military formations in the Second World War. She has also taught history of Ukraine and the Soviet Union at University College London, School of Slavonic and East European Studies, and the Ukrainian language at the University of Cambridge. In 2011 she received a PhD in history from University College London. She is the author of ‘Undetermined’ Ukrainians. Post-War Narratives of the Waffen SS ‘Galicia’ Division (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2013).

The lecture will be held in the framework of the Berlin-Brandenburg Ukraine Initiative (BBUI) at the Forum Transregionale Studien in cooperation with the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Osteuropakunde e. V. (DGO).

Datum:
28.04.2016, 18:00 Uhr

Ort:
Freie Universität Berlin
Osteuropa-Institut
Garystraße 55
14195 Berlin

Sprache(n):
Englisch

Veranstalterin:
Deutsche Gesellschaft für Osteuropakunde