Events & News

Curious about why many on the U.S. political right are now increasingly supporting Russia’s invasion of Ukraine? How does this group, historically so anti-Russian (remember the Cold War?), come to support Putin’s regime, even as Russia perpetrates what Human Rights Watch suggests are documented “crimes against humanity"? In this talk, Cinzia Solari explains why she thinks the geopolitics of gender is largely the answer.

Cinzia Solari is Associate Professor of Sociology at UMass Boston. Her first book, On the Shoulders of Grandmothers: Gender, Migration and Post-Soviet Nation-state Building, is winner of the 2020 Eastern Sociological Society’s Komarovsky Book Award. The book is a global ethnography that draws on 160 in-depth interviews with migrant Ukrainian domestic workers in Italy and California and their children in Ukraine to show that these migrant grandmothers are transnational agents in Ukraine’s post-Soviet nation-state building project. Solari’s second book with co-author Smitha Radhakrishnan, The Gender Order of Neoliberalism, debunks the myth that our current global order was inevitable and emerges from Western liberalism. Although the term neo-liberalism only claims liberalism as its pre-history, the book shows that socialism and postcolonialism are also important pre-histories to neoliberalism and that the varied gendered pathways into neoliberalism can also show us the way out to a fairer future.