Contesting the Value of Household Property, public lecture by Hadas Weiss, Institute for Advanced Study, CEU | Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology

Date:

Monday, December 1, 2014 - 5:30pm to 7:00pm

Contesting the Value of Household Property

Public lecture by Hadas Weiss

(Institute for Advanced Study, CEU)

Introduction: Middle-class households have never owned so much, yet the value of household property – especially in the wake of the recent economic crisis, which has priced people out of their homes and depleted their pension savings – is unstable and unreliable. Still, such property is routinely represented as a self-evident investment in the future, overriding even the most pressing day-to-day needs. Why is that? I try to resolve the puzzle of property and its value with reference to financialization – the insinuation of global finance into household economics – and by drawing on my ethnographic study of divorce proceedings in Israel.

Hadas Weiss is a junior research fellow at the Central European University Institute for Advanced Study. She has earned a PhD in anthropology from the University of Chicago, and has since been working on issues related to financialization and the middle class. Her work has been published in American Ethnologist, American Anthropologist, Cultural Anthropology, and elsewhere.

The 'Protest Events Dimension' of the Ukrainian Maidan: how significant were regional unevenness, far right participation, and violence?

Public lecture by Volodymyr Ishchenko

(Center for Society Research, Kiev)

For 5 years Volodymyr Ishcheko has been coordinating a project of collecting a systematic database of all protest and repressive events in Ukraine. Now possessing the full database of protest activity during the whole period of the former president Viktor Yanukovych's rule including the days of Maidan uprising, we can start answering a number of hotly debated and highly politicized questions. Particularly, what was the relative impact of protests in Kiev and beyond the capital, in the West and in the East of the country? Who were the most visible participants of Maidan and how significant was the far right participation in the protests? How did the dynamics of violence and repression develop during Maidan and was the 'revolution' a planned takeover of state power? Finally, which impact might all this have had on the ongoing civil war in Ukraine?

Bio:

Volodymyr Ishchenko is a sociologist studying social protests in Ukraine and an MA graduate from CEU's Sociology and Social Anthropology department. He is the deputy director of the Center for Social and Labor Research, a member of the editorial board of Commons: Journal for Social Criticism and LeftEast web-magazine, and a teacher at the Department of Sociology in the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy. He authored a number of comments and interviews about Ukrainian Maidan, particularly, for the Guardian and the New Left Review: http:// www.theguardian.com/ profile/volodymyr-ishchenko and http://newleftreview.org/ II/87/ volodymyr-ishchenko-ukraine -s-fr