Living in a “Parallel World”: Disability in Post-Soviet Ukraine

[Excerpt] These are challenges that are familiar to disabled people all over the world. Challenges such as these make many persons with disabilities in Ukraine feel as if they live in a “parallel world,” one separate from that enjoyed by “able-bodied” people. The disabled in Ukraine face both hidden and open discrimination in their daily lives, and they are stigmatized through popular stereotypes of disabled persons as inferior, deformed, and even contaminating. These attitudes stem in part from the Soviet-era policies towards the disabled, which perpetuated such harmful stereotypes. Persons with visible disabilities (i.e., spinal injuries, cerebral palsy, multiple sclerosis, mental problems, and others) were isolated in their homes, hidden from the public and thus made seemingly invisible. Since disability was seen as a defect and as a tragedy, the Soviet regime pursued a policy of compensation. The invisibility of disabled persons positioned them as a non-problem. Their lives were not discussed, and there was practically no public debate about their needs. When attempts were made to rehabilitate people with disabilities, rehabilitation was primarily medical and vocational in nature, an approach that reflects the ideology that the problem is located within the individual, who needs to be changed/improved (i.e., given maximum physical functioning or gainful employment)

Disability and Citizenship in Post-Soviet Ukraine: An Anthropological Critique

[Excerpt] In this paper I examine Ukraine’s burgeoning disability rights movement through the lens of citizenship to illustrate the complex processes through which certain categories of people (here, persons with disabilities) are transforming themselves—and being transformed— into particular types of citizens in a changing welfare state. I take an institutional and relational approach to understanding “citizenship,” a tack that has recently been suggested by scholars such as Margaret Somers (1994, 1995) and Allison Carey (2003), to suggest approaches to understanding citizen-state relations that shed light on the complex intersections of agency, power, and personhood that post-socialist social justice struggles entail

Where’s My Queer BBQ?: Supporting Queer Students at Historically Women’s Colleges

The experiences of Queer students at institutions of higher education have long been the subject of scholarship. Scholars explored research on campus climate, experience, and identity development. In the past, scholarship on historically women’s institutions explored leadership, history, and sexuality. However, the experiences of Queer students on historically women’s campuses are largely unstudied. As a graduate of a historically women’s institution who identifies as a Queer woman, I will reflect on my own experience of being a Queer student at a women’s college, and identify where Queer students receive the support they need to succeed

The case of equality in the Livingstone-Wagner Theorem

Let G be a permutation group acting on a set Ω of size n∈ℕ and let 1≤k<(n−1)/2. Livingstone and Wagner proved that the number of orbits of G on k-subsets of Ω is less than or equal to the number of orbits on (k+1)-subsets. We investigate the cases when equality occurs

Lithium-rich stars in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey

We report the discovery of 23 lithium-rich post-main-sequence stars, identified from moderate-resolution SDSS spectroscopy and confirmed with high-resolution spectra taken at the Hobby-Eberly Telescope. These new Li-rich stars cover a broad range in mass and evolutionary phase, including bright giants and post-AGB stars. The process responsible for preserving or producing excess lithium in a small fraction of evolved stars remains unclear.Comment: 5 pages, XII International Symposium on Nuclei in the Cosmos, August 5-12, 2012, Cairns, Australia. To appear in Proceedings of Scienc