Doctoral Fellow

Doctoral Fellow Denys GorbachDenys Gorbach

Discipline: Political Science
Supervisor: Jenny Andersson
Enrolled: September 2017

Denys Gorbach received his Master's degree in June 2017 from the Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology at Central European University, Budapest. Previously, he received his BA in political science and MA in philosophy from Kyiv-Mohyla Academy in Ukraine, and worked as an economic journalist. His research interests include political economy, social movements, and working class formation in the post-Soviet region. For his master’s project, Denys studied hegemonic configurations at the workplace and national level that prevented trade unions from becoming channels of radical political mobilisation. His current research project is focused on national populism in today's Ukraine – both as the basis of dominant national public discourses and as the defining factor of the country's national variety of capitalism.


  • Project description

    The (Un)making of the Ukrainian Working Class: Everyday Politics and Moral Economy in a Post-Socialist City

    The puzzle that motivates this thesis is a particular kind of populist politicization of industrial workers in Ukraine: while the imperative of engagement in political action aimed at bringing radical social change is widely shared among them on the discursive level, it coexists with a demobilizing stance that condemns all political participation as corrupt. This contradictory attitude to politics defines the character of populist mass mobilizations that shook Ukraine in 2004 and 2014, as well as the electoral overhaul of 2019. In order to explain it, the dissertation asks how the Ukrainian working class relates to the world of politics – both in the sense of objective relations mediated by social structures and mechanisms acting at the workplace and at the urban level, and in the sense of subjective attitude to the political domain. This ethnographic exploration of the everyday politics of the workers focuses on the moral economy that constitutes the class and structures its relations with other social groups.

    The research is based on fieldwork conducted in the city of Kryvyi Rih between 2018 and 2021. It consisted of ethnographic interviews, participant observation at a factory, analysis of local press archives, and digital ethnography continued after departure from the site. The analysis proceeds on multiple scales: from the political dynamics on the city level, it descends to the level of workplace politics, and finally to individual strategies of economic survival and symbolic distinction.

    The dissertation argues that the debilitating effect the postsocialist socioeconomic crisis had on the workers’ political agency was exacerbated by the paternalist mechanisms that emerged to attenuate the crisis. At the same time, the “oligarchic democracy” of the 2000s brought with it the moralization of politics and polarized it along the identitarian axes. These processes shaped the options for political participation available to workers: exploiting moralized ethnolinguistic hierarchies in individual distinction strategies or withdrawing altogether from the public into the private domain. In both cases, programmatic agonistic politics is discarded in favor of antagonistic vision that closes off the political space and spawns lay technocratic authoritarian anti-corruption projects.

    opener

Short biography

  • June 2015-present: openDemocracy.net. Contributor to the section covering Eastern Europe and former Soviet Union – analysis of social and politico-economic issues regarding Ukraine
  • 2015-2017: Central European University, Budapest, Hungary. MA in Sociology and Social Anthorpology, with Global and Urban Studies Specialization. MA thesis title "Underground Waterlines: Explaining Political Quiescence of Ukrainian Trade Unions"
  • 2014-2015: Centre.UA NGO, Kyiv, Ukraine. Economic analyst.

Teaching experience

  • Fall 2020: Research Workshop: Qualitative Methods of Social Inquiry. Sciences Po Reims campus, own course.
  • 2020−2021: Capstone Project (Parcours civique). Sciences Po Reims campus, academic advisor.
  • March 2020: Studying post-Soviet (re)productive labour through an ethnographic lens. Labour-atory: research school on contemporary concepts and empirical approaches in labour studies (Moscow), own course (co-authored with Volodymyr Artiukh and Oksana Dutchak).
  • March 2020: Labour, value, money: The great theoretical debate. Labour-atory: research school on contemporary concepts and empirical approaches in labour studies (Moscow), own course (co-authored with Volodymyr Artiukh and Oksana Dutchak).
  • Fall 2019: Research Workshop: Qualitative Methods of Social Inquiry. Sciences Po Reims campus, own course.
  • Fall 2019: Comparative Politics. Sciences Po Paris campus, course of Laura Morales, seminar groups.
  • Fall 2018: The Great Transition − Responsibility, Innovation, Commons. Sciences Po School of Management and Innovation, course of Marie-Laure Djelic, Dominique Cardon and Eloi Laurent, TA.

Selected publications


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