Citoyennes soignantes

In April 2014, at the start of the war in eastern Ukraine, also known as the Donbass war, which pitted the Ukrainian government against Russia and its local separatist proxies, the Kharkiv medical-military hospital became one of the main facilities for treating military casualties, at a time when the Ukrainian army's chronic underfunding was having a serious impact on its hospitals.

After nine years of ethnographic research, Ioulia Shukan takes us on a journey of commitment and citizenship through the lives of seven women with very different profiles who chose to become volunteers at this hospital. As well as collecting donations from the Ukrainian population, they devote several hours a week to caring for the injured, providing them with logistical and psychological support. With no medical training and no experience of working together, they reinvent forms of interpersonal solidarity and civic action on a daily basis.

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Ioulia Shukan is a lecturer in Slavic studies at the Université Paris Nanterre and a researcher at the Institut des sciences sociales du politique. Her early work in political sociology focused on two post-Soviet states (Ukraine and Belarus) and concerned actors (communist elites, members of parliament), institutions (parliaments, partisan and electoral systems, political mandate) and collective action (Orange Revolution of 2004, Maïdan in the winter of 2013-2014).

Since 2014, Ioulia Shukan has been working on citizen mobilisations behind the armed conflict in the Donbass, in eastern Ukraine. Her research is in line with approaches that decompartmentalise the ‘war’ object to make it an object of sociological analysis and that anchor armed conflicts in social practices, local dynamics and situations of uncertainty between war and peace; it is structured around two main axes.