CUNY Academic Commons

May 16 Jokic on working class migrants in former YugoslaviaFriday, May 16, 2025 2pm to 3pm (New York time) In-person and on Zoom Olivera Jokić Associate Professor, English and Gender Studies, John Jay College,  CUNY From Unlettered Women: Documenting Socialism’s Working Class Women Migrants This workshop considers how we could account for the presence of working-class women in historical tableaux of Eastern Europe of the late twentieth century if those women have been difficult to heroize in dominant versions of feminist historiography and left behind scant documentation. The workshop starts from material for biographical sketches of three women born to peasant families in the 1910s, across regions that were to become socialist Yugoslavia. These women were adults in the aftermath of World War II, when socialist Yugoslavia introduced its radical social policies that promised equal rights to women, from the vote to open access to education and property ownership. As a result of these policies, they spent much of their adult lives in the same small town in present-day Serbia. Far removed from the central theaters of social change and modernization, and too old to become “new women,” they made use of the new possibilities available to women in ways that existing historiographies of gender in the region and in so-called “communist Eastern Europe” have hardly mentioned. Newly entitled to dispose of their property and to use their children’s education for social and geographic mobility, these women contributed to the network of intense migration in the mid-twentieth century Yugoslavia that shapes the politics of gender and urbanization in the region to this day, down to the neo-traditionalist demands for a “return to normal” and repolarization of gender categories that benefits a free-market society. The workshop will consider how historical change can register in the life narratives of these women, and how we can trace the changing conceptions of gender from the scarce materials at hand. Learning how to read the materials at hand, we learn how to do without the abstractions of feminist politics, state-mandated modernization, and apparent disappearance of a whole world committed to “socialism” or “emancipation.” Olivera Jokić is a scholar of writing about gender and imagination, contacts between writers of fiction and documentation, constitution of archival collections and genres of experience. Most recently, she translated Past: An Introduction to the Problem (kuda.org + Iskra Books 2024), a collaborative book project about the work of filmmaker Želimir Žilnik as a body of knowledge about the real existing fantasy space that was socialist Yugoslavia. 2pm to 3pm  Register here for Zoom Or join us in person at the CUNY Graduate Center 365 5th Ave, N […] “May 16 Jokic on working class migrants in former Yugoslavia”

Mar. 28: Soloviova on women in Soviet Ukraine Aliesia Soloviova Visiting scholar at the Columbia University/PhD candidate at the European University Institute(Florence) Soviet emancipation in Ukraine: the right to work a “double shift” This presentation, drawn from a chapter of my doctoral dissertation, delves into the dual expectations of motherhood and labor imposed by Soviet policy in Ukraine, particularly from the 1950s until the collapse of the Soviet Union. I will explore the lived experiences of women who bore five or more children while working in difficult and hazardous jobs, as well as the challenges faced by single mothers during this era. Additionally, I will discuss the long-term effects of these dual responsibilities on post-Soviet Ukrainian society. By focusing on Soviet Ukraine, this research aims to contribute to the gradual development of the perception of the republics of the USSR as separate states with their own history and national identity, who once had been in an “arranged marriage”, but then lived “separately ever after”. Aliesia Soloviova is a PhD student in history at the European University Institute, specializing in the study of marriage dynamics in Soviet Ukraine through archival research and qualitative analysis. Her work examines how state policies, social expectations, and individual experiences shaped marriage across different regions, drawing on personal testimonies, legal documents, and demographic records. Using data science methodologies, she integrates historical sources with computational tools to reveal patterns in Soviet marriage practices. In addition to her historical research, she holds a PhD in International Relations and a Master’s Degree in Data Science.  Friday, Mar 28, 2-3PM via Zoom  Register H […] “Mar. 28: Soloviova on women in Soviet Ukraine”

Video recording of Feb. 25 talk: Ukraine and gender studiesJanet Elise Johnson’s talk from Feb. 25, 2025, Three Years of Full-Scale War: How Studying Ukraine can Change Gender Studies, is now available online at: https://youtu.be/xhTmopT18aM?si=PyeuBx9pECBseC0e

Feb. 25: Johnson on three years of full-scale war in Ukraine and gender studies Special Event: Brooklyn College Endowed Chair in Women’s and Gender Studies talk Three Years of Full-Scale War: How Studying Ukraine can Change Gender Studies moderated by Mara Lazda, Bronx Community College Tuesday, Feb. 25 11AM-12:15PMBrooklyn College Library, Woody Tanger Auditorium, and zoom  This lecture is a moment to reflect on the third-year anniversary of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine and to consider how studying Eastern Europe can change gender studies, including giving us insight into today’s other turmoils. Over the last four decades, gender studies has been transformed, moving from mostly the study of the West to taking the rest of the world seriously. Yet, still often invisible is this part of the world, the site of much mass violence, decades of state socialism, and one of the first places to be subsumed by right-wing anti-genderism. This lecture will reflect on key feminist issues today, such as reflexivity, intersectionality, decolonialism, and solidarity.  Janet Elise Johnson is the Endowed Chair in Women’s and Gender Studies, Brooklyn College, 2023-2025, and Professor of Political Science, Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center, CUNY.  Her research focuses on gender, feminist activism, corruption, authoritarianism, and gendered violence in Russia and Ukraine. Her most recent book is The Routledge Handbook of Gender in Central-Eastern Europe and Eurasia (co-edited with Katalin Fábián and Mara Lazda, 2022), which won the 2022 Heldt prize for the best book from the Association for Women in Slavic Studies. Since 2008, she has been one of the coordinators of a monthly workshop on Gender and Transformation in Central-Eastern Europe and Eurasia no […] “Feb. 25: Johnson on three years of full-scale war in Ukraine and gender studies”