Vortrag von Emily Channell-Justice (Sektion ZH / ISEK)
Mittwoch, 18. März 2026, 18:30 Uhr, ISEK, Affolternstrasse 56, 8050 Zürich, Raum AFL E-015
Die Veranstaltung ist Teil der Vortragreihe «Zukünfte (in) der Krise», unterstützt von der SAGW.
Contested Futures: The Legacy of the Euromaidan among Political Activists in Ukraine
This presentation draws from ethnographic research with Ukrainian leftist, feminist, and student activists in Kyiv to argue that “self-organization” has changed the nature of Ukrainian society since 2014. Self-organization was a key component of the 2013-2014 Euromaidan mobilizations in Ukraine, which resulted in the overthrow of the Viktor Yanukovych regime and marked a distinctive moment in Ukraine’s post-independence period. The concept came to be used by diverse groups of protesters during Euromaidan, including far-right organizations, to indicate any kind of political action that was not connected to existing political parties—in other words, without the state. On the one hand, the wide expansion of self-organization during the Euromaidan protests allowed activists to envision a world based on mutual aid and diverse political points of view. On the other, the reliance on self-organized responses to internal displacement and war mobilization in 2014 meant that state institutions were largely not reformed after Maidan. This presentation explores the ways activists engaged with to these two processes: their own (often unfulfilled) visions for the future, and the disappearance of possibilities for real reform. In the years after the Euromaidan, many activists concluded the protest movement failed; however, more than ten years on, we can consider more positive assessments of the long-term effects of the mobilizations—not only for activists, but for Ukraine more broadly.
The evening has been organised in collaboration with GNIP, an activist group who supports left-wing soldiers on the front line in Ukraine. After the lecture, Emily Channell-Justice and Tatjana Retiukhina, a GNIP activist, will lead a short panel discussion. The floor will then be opened to the audience. Moderation: Olga Reznikova
Presenter
Emily Channell-Justice is the Director of the Temerty Contemporary Ukraine Program at the Ukrainian Research Institute, Harvard University. A sociocultural anthropologist, she first started learning the Ukrainian language and carrying out research in Ukraine in 2012. She pursued research on political activism and social movements among students and feminists during the 2013-2014 Euromaidan mobilizations. She is the author of an ethnography, Without the State: Self-Organization and Political Activism in Ukraine (University of Toronto; 2022), and an edited volume, Decolonizing Queer Experience: LGBT+ Narratives from Eastern Europe and Eurasia (Lexington Books; 2020). She has published academic articles in several journals, including History and Anthropology, Revolutionary Russia, and Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society. She received her PhD from The Graduate Center, City University of New York, in September 2016, and she was a Havighurst Fellow and Visiting Assistant Professor of International Studies at Miami University, Ohio from 2016-2019.
Further information
Entry: free
Registration: not required
Contact: olga.reznikova@uzh.ch