Dispossession: Anthropological Perspectives on Russia’s War Against Ukraine

Book Panel with:

Laada Bilaniuk, Professor of Anthropology at the University of Washington

Emily Channell-Justice, Director of the Temerty Contemporary Ukraine Program at the Ukrainian Research Institute, Harvard University

Natalia Otrishchenko, Research Fellow at the Center for Urban History in Lviv

Tatiana Vagramenko, Senior Postdoctoral Researcher at University College Cork

Organized and moderated by Catherine Wanner, Jacyk Distinguished Fellow, Ukrainian Research Institute, Harvard University and Professor of History, Anthropology, and Religious Studies at Penn State University.

ONLINE ONLY via Zoom Webinar (live). Registration is required to attend.

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About the Book

This volume examines Russia’s war on Ukraine. Scholars who have lived through the Russian invasion or who have conducted ethnographic research in the region for decades provide timely analysis of a war that will leave a lasting mark on the twenty-first century. Using the concept of dispossession, this volume showcases some of the novel ways violence operates in the Russian-Ukrainian war and the multiple means by which civilians, within the conflict zone and beyond, have become active participants in the war effort. Anthropological perspectives on war provide on-the-ground insight, historically informed analysis, and theoretical engagement to depict the experiences of dispossession by war and the motivations that drive the responses of the dispossessed. Such perspectives humanize the victims even as they depict the very inhumanity of war. Dispossession is geared towards upper-level undergraduate and graduate students, scholars, and the general reader who seeks to have a deeper understanding of the Russian-Ukrainian war as it continues to impact geopolitics more broadly. [Source]

Read the Open Access version of the book here >>

The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

About the Speakers

Laada Bilaniuk is a professor of anthropology at the University of Washington. Her research focuses on language ideology, language politics, popular culture, identity construction, and nation-building. Her book, Contested Tongues: Language Politics and Cultural Correction in Ukraine (2005, Cornell University Press), draws on ethnographic fieldwork and historical sources to untangle the complex sociolinguistic situation in Ukraine and how it evolved after independence. She has also published numerous articles and book chapters on various aspects of sociolinguistics, race, gender, and popular culture. She is currently working on a book on the politics of popular culture in Ukraine. She received her PhD from the University of Michigan.

Emily Channell-Justice is Director of the Temerty Contemporary Ukraine Program at the Ukrainian Research Institute, Harvard University. Her ethnography Without the State: Self-Organization and Political Activism in Ukraine (2022, University of Toronto Press) won the American Association of Ukrainian Studies Book Prize. Her edited volume, Decolonizing Queer Experience: LGBT+ Narratives from Eastern Europe and Eurasia (Lexington Books), was published in 2020. She received her PhD from The Graduate Center, City University of New York, and was a Havighurst Fellow and a Visiting Assistant Professor of International Studies at Miami University, Ohio.

Natalia Otrishchenko is a sociologist and a research fellow at the Center for Urban History in Lviv. From 2019 to 2022, she was an associate researcher at the Center for Contemporary History in Potsdam, and during the 2022–2023 academic year, she was a Fulbright Visiting Scholar at the Department of Sociology, Columbia University. Since March 2022, she has led the Ukrainian team of the “24/02/22, 5 am” documentation initiative. Her research interests include qualitative methods, oral history, memory studies, urban sociology, and sociology of expertise. She holds a PhD in sociological methodology from the Institute of Sociology, the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine.

Tatiana Vagramenko is a social anthropologist and a religious studies scholar. She is currently a senior postdoctoral researcher at University College Cork and a principal investigator of the SFI-IRC Pathway-funded project History Declassified: The KGB and the Religious Underground in Soviet Ukraine. Her work focuses on the anthropology of religion in post-Soviet Ukraine and Russia, and the complex history of the entanglement of religion with the Soviet secret police and its legacy in the post-communist context. She is a co-editor, with James Kapaló, of Hidden Galleries: Material Religion in the Secret Police Archives in Central and Eastern Europe (2020, Lit Verlag) and, with Nadezhda Beliakova, of The Lives of Soviet Secret Agents: Religion and Police Surveillance in the USSR (2024, Lexington Books). She received her PhD in anthropology from the National University of Ireland Maynooth.

Catherine Wanner is a professor of anthropology, history, and religious studies at the Pennsylvania State University. Using ethnographic and archival methods, her research centers on the politics of religion and increasingly on conflict mediation and trauma healing. In 2020, she was awarded the Distinguished Scholar Prize from the Association for the Study of Eastern Christianity. She is the convener of the Working Group on Lived Religion in Eastern Europe and Eurasia. She is an author or editor of six books on Ukraine, most recently Everyday Religiosity and the Politics of Belonging in Ukraine (2022, Cornell). She earned a doctorate in Cultural Anthropology from Columbia University.

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This event is organized by Harvard's Ukrainian Research Institute (HURI) as part of the Petro Jacyk Seminar in Ukrainian Studies.

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