We invite you to the lecture “Life after Traumatic Limb Amputation in Ukraine: Between Individual Experiences and Reconfiguration of Prosthetic Care Provision” by Dr Ioulia Shukan.
30 April at 18:30
Conference room of the Center for Urban History (6 Bohomoltsia Street, Lviv)
Language: English with simultaneous translation into Ukrainian
At the intersection of a micro-analysis of the biographies of severely wounded servicemen and a macro-level study of the structural reconfigurations in Ukraine since 2022 in the fields of medical care, prosthetics, rehabilitation, and inclusion, this talk will examine the reconstruction of life after traumatic limb amputation. It will focus on individual experiences of medical care, prosthetic fitting, and socio-professional reintegration, as well as choices regarding prosthetic services and body-restorative technologies. Additionally, it will explore the various forms of assistance and solidarity provided by different actors, between the state, local authorities, public and private fitting centres, charities, hospital volunteers, associations specializing in war trauma rehabilitation, and families.
Above all, this lecture will analyse the strategies servicemen, who have experienced traumatic limb amputation, use to navigate three interlocking models of (health)care: the Soviet biomedical model, the neoliberal model, and the citizen-solidarity model. Particular attention will be paid to their agency of these individuals. Despite their situational or permanent vulnerabilities, they mobilize themselves for the common good, act as mediators of experience, critique the dedicated care systems, and contribute to their evolution.
Part of the talk will also address methodological and theoretical challenges, including the ethics of interviewing individuals who have suffered trauma and are undergoing reconstruction, the difficulty of capturing intimate experiences through interviews, the heuristic value of ethnography, and the challenges of transforming medical controversies or issues of duty of care for combatants in wartime into sociological questions.
Ioulia Shukan is a sociologist, professor at the School for Advanced Studies in Social Sciences (EHESS) in Paris. She has recently completed a book project, drawing from her long-term ethnographical research in 2014-2022, on Ukrainian women’s involvement in voluntary caregiving for wounded servicemen at Kharkiv military hospital (forthcoming, June 2025). She is currently working on a new project that explores, in sociology and in real time, but also in dialogue with the history of the 20th century wars and mutilations, the bodily impact of the Russian-Ukrainian war with a particular focus on individual experiences of wartime limb amputation, on reinvention of civic solidarities in the face of this traumatic experience and, beyond that, on reconfiguration of care for people with disabilities in Ukraine.
In April, Ioulia Shukan joins INDEX-Centre for Urban History Fellowship programme.
The event is co-organised by the Center for Urban History and INDEX within the public programme "Source as a Choice."
During the meetings, researchers will share their work with various sources on war and mass violence in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The choice to create and preserve sources can be one of the tools for embodying this violence or, on the contrary, for opposing it. Our choice to talk about these events through the prism of certain sources creates a field in which the complex past will live on in the present and future.
