Doctoral Dissertation Research: Neoliberalism, Gender, and Politics in Post-Soviet Societies

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This project will examine the effects of economic restructuring and rising social and political conservatism on gender roles in post-Soviet societies. While much research has explored the effects of neoliberal economic restructuring in post-Soviet regions on ethnicity, labor, and nationalism, fewer studies have paid attention to the connections between gender and domesticity and the geopolitical and economic changes in the region. Anxieties arising from economic liberalization have led to calls for new regulations on family values, gender roles and domesticity. This study will analyze how neoliberalism and nationalism are redefining gender identities in order to shed light on how political actors draw on symbols of the "home" and "family" to justify restrictive social policies and, in some cases, validate engagement in political conflict. Understanding how political and economic processes link with intimate home and family matters will also help to elucidate the effectiveness of international development programs seeking to empower women. Documenting the way women navigate social and economic change in their everyday lives will inform regional development policies in an effort to alleviate gender based violence and poverty. Various groups in post-Soviet Armenia have been struggling with economic and geopolitical anxieties caused by continual economic and political transformations. Many of these anxieties have manifested in new concerns over gender roles and the socioeconomic and political meanings of home and domestic spaces. To better understand these changes, this study asks: 1) What is the symbolic significance of the home and practices of domesticity in geopolitical debates? 2) What are the impacts of economic restructuring on practices of domesticity and the spatial politics of home? 3) How do the symbolic meanings of the home and everyday domestic practices become sites for reproducing or contesting neoliberalism and geopolitical divides? Specifically, this research will examine the discursive production of gender and the material conditions within which people experience and navigate economic change. The researchers will employ critical geography perspectives to illuminate how economic transformations materially affect everyday lives and the ways in which gendered subjects are produced or transformed. The study relies on qualitative methods including semi- structured interviews, participant observation, and textual analysis of news and magazine articles about contemporary domesticity. Data gathered from these sources will be triangulated to understand how various actors - citizens, political groups, and international development programs - have renegotiated the value of women's domestic labor as a result of economic restructuring and growing social conservatism.