Anastasiya Ryabchuk

This research project is situated in the context of international development actors redefining vulnerability in the frontline communities of the Donbas. Anastasiya Ryabchuk explores, firstly, which social groups are identified as vulnerable and in greatest need of humanitarian assistance; secondly, how the understanding of vulnerability evolves over time; and finally, how this changing understanding of vulnerability reflects ideological and bureaucratic shifts in the development aid sector.

As the socialist project went bankrupt with the break-up of the USSR, workers were left in an ideological vacuum. It was filled either by hope-filled dreams of  successful individual adaptation to the capitalist order, or by nostalgic sentiment towards the Soviet past as a means of critiquing the present, or (on the contrary) by blaming all the current problems on the Soviet past in an attempt at ‘decommunisation’ and investing in nationalist or religious conservative projects.

My scientific interests are in the fields of poverty, urban marginality, class structure and stratification in post-soviet societies, Marxist and Bourdieusian sociological approaches and qualitative research methods. This is the reason why I have chosen to translate the book An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology by Pierre Bourdieu and Loïc Wacquant into Ukrainian during my stay at the IWM. The French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu has produced one of the most influential bodies of social theory in the post-war era. In this book he offers a systematic overview of his work. A translation will make Bourdieu’s thematic and methodological principles accessible to both Ukrainian students as well as advanced scholars.