“Democratization, privatization, and women's lives in postsocialist Ukraine”
In postsocialist Ukraine, with privatization and the scaling back of the social safety net, it is primarily women who have been left as leaders of service-oriented NGOs and mutual aid associations, caring for the marginalized and destitute with little or no support from the Ukrainian state. Sarah D. Phillips follows 11 activists over the course of several years to document the unexpected effects that social activism has produced for women: increasing social inequality and "differentiation" in the form of new cultural criteria for productive citizenship and new definitions of the rights and needs of various categories of citizens.
"Shapes in the Wax," Ethnographic Video
In the late 1990s, I traveled around rural Western Ukraine to study the practices of elderly women folk healers known as “babky.” The result of this research is an ethnographic video, “Shapes in the Wax: Tradition and Faith among Folk Medicine Practitioners in Rural Ukraine” (2004) in which the healers demonstrate their rituals and reflect on their lives as elders, healers, and women in Ukraine. For more information on this project, see my "Research" section.
Professor Phillips teaches and conducts research in a number of areas including:
Medical Anthropology; Central and Eastern Europe; the Former Soviet Union, especially Ukraine and Russia; postsocialist transformations; civil society and non-governmental organizations (NGOs); globalization; development; gender studies; post-Chernobyl health and healing; folk medicine; and disability studies.
