Disability and Mobile Citizenship in Postsocialist Ukraine

Sarah D. Phillips examines the struggles of disabled persons in Ukraine and the other former Soviet states to secure their rights during the tumultuous political, economic, and social reforms of the last two decades. Through participant observation and interviews with disabled Ukrainians across the social spectrum―rights activists, politicians, students, workers, entrepreneurs, athletes, and others―Phillips documents the creative strategies used by people on the margins of postsocialist societies to assert claims to "mobile citizenship." She draws on this rich ethnographic material to argue that public storytelling is a powerful means to expand notions of relatedness, kinship, and social responsibility, and which help shape a more tolerant and inclusive society.

Sarah D. Phillips is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Indiana University Bloomington and author of Women's Social Activism in the New Ukraine (IUP, 2008).