Cinzia Solari will discuss the findings of her book On the Shoulders of Grandmothers, which uncovers two unique grandmother-led migrations from Ukraine in the post-Soviet era: one, a "forced" migration to Italy, the other a "voluntary" one to California. Drawing on 160 interviews and two years of ethnographic field work with Ukrainian migrants and their adult non-migrant children in Ukraine, Solari shows that post-Soviet Ukrainian nation-state-building is occurring transnationally. By comparing the experiences of individual migrants in two different transnational social fields, the talk exposes the production of new gendered capitalist economics and nationalisms that precariously place Ukraine between Europe and Russia, with implications for the global world order.
