This book provides a theoretically and empirically grounded examination of the struggle for maternity care in contemporary Russia, framed by changes to the healthcare system and the roles of its participants after socialism. The chapters consider multiple perspectives and interactions between women and professionals and the structural and institutional pressures they face when striving for better conditions and treatment.

The August 2020 issue of Global Dialogue, the International Sociological Association's (ISA) open access digital magazine published in 17 languages, has been released. The Managing Editor of the magazine in Russia is Elena Zdravomyslova, Co-Director of the Gender Studies Program, Professor of Sociology at the European University in Saint Petersburg, with the participation of Anastasia Daur and Valentina Isaeva.

The New York Times newspaper published an article about how people around the world start keeping their diaries with their experiences of living through a pandemic. Their diaries are told in words and pictures: pantry inventories, window views, questions about the future, concerns about the present. Some diarists record statistics: the number of infections, the number of deaths. Others keep diaries that are part shopping list, part doodle pad.

Women in Russia and Turkey face pervasive discrimination. Only a small percentage dare to challenge their mistreatment in court. Facing domestic police and judges who often refuse to recognize discrimination, a tiny minority of activists have exhausted their domestic appeals and then turned to their last hope: the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR). The ECtHR is widely regarded as the most effective international human rights court in existence. Russian citizens whose rights have been violated at home have brought tens of thousands of cases to the ECtHR in the last 20 years.

In Sweden in the 1930´s, legislation was introduced to promote access to contraceptives and abortion. It was followed by a decrimininalization of homosexual contacts, and the introduction of sexuality education in schools. Critical voices in Sweden and in other countries could describe these reforms as a sexual revolution from above, governed by the state.

The lecture is cancelled. We are sorry for the inconvinience.  

After the great success of Viagra, pharmaceutical companies have set a new goal: the "female Viagra", i.e. a pill for hypoactive sexual desire disorder (HSDD), the most commonly diagnosed female sexual dysfunction. Each subsequent proposal for the treatment of low desire showed the process of disease mongering in all its glory and simultaneous attempts to strengthen the hypotheses about its biological basis: depending of the drug manufacturer HSDD was supposed to be due to androgen deficiency, disordered pelvic blood circulation, or neurotransmitters imbalance.

Since his rise to power in 1999, Vladimir Putin has crafted a public persona whose appeal relies on a clearly constructed larger-than-life masculinity. Perceived by some as the return of charismatic leadership to post-Soviet Russia and by others as pure camp, Putin’s masculinity functions as the cornerstone of a gender order that paradoxically seeks to naturalize the binary opposition between male and female through artifice and exaggeration.

For many years Jacqueline Bhabha has worked on issues of human rights and migration with a focus on gender and child related challenges; over the last decade she has also done research on economic and social rights, particularly focused on preventing harms such as exploitation, exclusion and violence that so often trigger migration and the vulnerabilities that result.

On November 14th, the session “Experts in Sexuality: Scientific, Legal, Everyday, and Economic Versions of Sex” was held as part of the VDNH-9 conference. Participants discussed discourses of power that form knowledge about sexuality in contemporary society.

On October 19th, as part of a Gender Studies program seminar, EUSP hosted a lecture by Laurie Essig (Middlebury College)

On April 16th and 17th, EUSP hosted an international conference organized by the Gender Studies Program with support from the EUSP’s Committee on Academic Planning.

On April 15th, Michele Rivkin-Fish (Professor of Anthropology, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill) gave a lecture as part of an interdisciplinary seminar hosted by the EUSP’s Gender Studies Program and the Department of Political Science and Sociology.

On December 23, as part of the interdisciplinary seminar “Care Regimes for the Aging Citizens” and the EUSP Department of Political Science and Sociology’s Gender Studies Program, Zhanna Chernova (Doctor of Sociology, Higher School of Economics-St. Petersburg) delivered a lecture. Researchers began to take an interest in issues of care in the 1980s and 1990s, when it was seen primarily in the context of parenting. This talk discusses three approaches to conceptualizing care that have been established in scientific literature.

The intriguingly titled program “18 +: A New Framework for Gender Citizenship” drew participants from the most diverse disciplines. The seminar took place with support from the Novartis Corporation.

Conference programme (pdf 119KB) 

This seminar was organized by Osteoropa Institut (Regensburg, Germany) and Gender Studies Program (EUSP). During the meeting, participants discussed transformations of private life and gender roles that occur in contemporary Russia and Germany. They also considered the impact, which these transformations have on women’s subjective life satisfaction. In the seminar session researchers from Osteoropa Institut (Ekaterina Selezneva) and European University at St.Petersburg (Vera Galindabaeva, Ekaterina Borozdina) presented findings of their recent projects.