Dr Svitlana Oksamytna, National University of 'Kyiv-Mohyla Academy', Ukraine University of Glasgow: 02 - 28 March 2015
Published: 25 November 2016
◾3-week module ‘Post-Soviet Ukraine: A Case Study in Socio-Economic and Political Transformation’ 04 - 18 March 2014
In the course of my 4-week period at Glasgow on IMRCEES Visiting Scholarship, I was involved into the number of activities which I described in this report.
Teaching. I taucht a course ‘Post-Soviet Ukraine: A Case Study in Socio-Economic, Socio-Cultural and Political Transformation’ as part of the IMRCEES programme. I specifically designed this course for IM students to both reflect my own research interests and to provide opportunities for more general discussions of recent and current political, cultural, and economical events and changes in Ukraine, to give students an understanding of Ukraine’s post-Soviet transformation during the last two decades. In particular, the course aims to contextualise these transformations using current social theory, and to apply this theory to an empirical analysis of concrete social phenomena that have appeared in Ukraine since independence (among them entrepreneurs, new elites, and ‘Orange’ values, new types of identities and identity conflicts, Ukrainian-Russian conflicts).
Research. Mainly, I used my time at Glasgow to work on a several articles that I have started on the topic of some social transformations in post-Soviet Ukraine.
This articles have been focucing mainly on intergenerational social mobility in the focus of academic and political interests, dealing with the meaning of intergenerational social mobility research for understanding of the entire social inequality in society, particularly inequality of opportunity further to inequality of conditions. Issues of social mobility have assumed political centrality in many western countries, including UK, and international organizations. Social mobility is considered as a very important component of the social cohesion along with the social inclusion and social capital. Comprehensive analysis of the intergenerational social mobility has neither academic, no political meaning in the contemporary Ukraine. Also I analysed intergeneration class and educational mobility in Ukraine, comparing Soviet and Post-Soviet periods, namely associations between men’s and women’s class origins and class destinations in the dynamic institutional environment.
Another topic of my research was devoted to the dynamics of educational inequality according to residence and type of educational institutions, namely the type of secondary schools and residence influence on the average score of external independent evaluation.
It is evident, that the research I was doing had been closely connected to the course I was teaching to IM students there, as well as to the teaching I am routinely involved into in my home University (National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy).
This scholarship also allowed me to work on strengthening the ties between my home University (NaUKMA) and CEES, University of Glasgow through my research activities, teaching and academic meetings and discussions, which I see as an important aspect of my visit.
First published: 25 November 2016