Region, Nation and Beyond. An Interdisciplinary and Transcultural Reconceptualization of Ukraine
01.11.2011
On November 1, 2011 a new project entitled "Region, Nation and Beyond. An Interdisciplinary and Transcultural Reconceptualization of Ukraine" was launched. It was initiated and coordinated by the University of St. Gallen (Switzerland). The project showed how Ukraine could best be understood through its regions and how the regions had to be considered in conjunction with the nation. Thus the project aimed at a reconceptualization of Ukraine as a fluid construct where various discourses intersect, concur and eventually merge. It explicitly moved beyond the perspective of an entity irrevocably defined by traditional political borders and cultural, economic, historical or religious stereotypes.
The project involved historians, sociologists, anthropologists, economists, literary critics and linguists from Ukraine, Russia, Poland, Switzerland, Germany, Austria, Canada and the USA. The project resulted in a collaborative volume of essays and articles published in international journals. The project lasted for three years, and included the development and implementation of a qualitative sociological survey (in-depth interviews and discussions) in 11 cities, representing different parts of Ukraine. The survey was coordinated at the Center for Urban History of East Central Europe by Dr. Victoria Sereda.
Dr. Viktoriya Sereda
sociologist, Candidate of Sociological Sciences, Docent. Received graduate degrees at the Ivan Franko National University of Lviv (History), the Eotvos Lorand University of Budapest (UNESCO Ethnic and Minority Studies MA Program), and the University of Edinburgh (MSc by Research in Sociology). In 2006 she has defended her Candidate of Sciences (PhD) dissertation (“Regional Historical Identities and Their Influence on Political Orientations in Ukraine”) at the Institute of Sociology of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine (supervisor – Dr. Yevhen Holovakha). Since 2002 she has been working at the Department of History and Theory of Sociology at the Ivan Franko National University of Lviv. Visiting fellow at the Harvard University (HURI), the University of Bremen, the IWM (Vienna), and the Central European University (Budapest).
Research interests: urban sociology, sociology of everyday life, memory studies, nationalism and identity studies. V.Sereda is conducting research in the area closely related to the project’s main focus since 2000. She has more than 40 publications in Austria, Hungary, Poland, Russia, and Ukraine, as well as experience of organization and implementation of more than 20 sociological projects including surveys, focus group discussions, in-depth interviews, content- and discourse-analysis.
Credits
Сover Image: University of St. Gallen