Monday, 15 December 2025, 5:30 CET

At this PoSoCoMeS seminar, Catherine Wanner discusses her book Everyday Religiosity and the Politics of Belonging in Ukraine (Cornell University Press, 2022) with Zuzanna Bogumił.

Zoom link: https://psu.zoom.us/j/99595105069

About the book

Everyday Religiosity and the Politics of Belonging in Ukraine reveals how and why religion has become a pivotal political force in a society struggling to overcome the legacy of its entangled past with Russia and chart a new future.

If Ukraine is “ground zero” in the tensions between Russia and the West, religion is an arena where the consequences of conflicts between Russia and Ukraine keenly play out. Vibrant forms of everyday religiosity pave the way for religion to be weaponized and securitized to advance political agendas in Ukraine and beyond. These practices, Catherine Wanner argues, enable religiosity to be increasingly present in public spaces, public institutions, and wartime politics in a pluralist society that claims to be secular. Based on ethnographic data and interviews conducted since before the Revolution of Dignity and the outbreak of armed combat in 2014, Wanner investigates the conditions that catapulted religiosity, religious institutions, and religious leaders to the forefront of politics and geopolitics.

Links to the book in open access:

Author

Dr. Catherine Wanner is Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of History, Anthropology and Religious Studies, Penn State University, USA. She earned her doctorate in Cultural Anthropology from Columbia University before embarking on over 30 years of ethnographic and archival research in Ukraine. Her most recent monograph is Everyday Religiosity and the Politics of Belonging in Ukraine (2022), and she is also the editor of Dispossession: Anthropological Approaches to Russia’s War against Ukraine (Routledge, 2023). Her research has focused primarily on the politics of religion in Ukraine and increasingly on human rights and conflict mediation within the context of war. She is the convenor of the Working Group on Lived Religion in Eastern Europe and Eurasia. In 2016-17, she was a visiting professor at the Institute of European Ethnology, Humboldt University, and in 2019-20 she was a Fulbright Scholar at the Ukrainian Catholic University. In 2020 she was awarded the Distinguished Scholar Prize from the Association for the Study of Eastern Christianity.

Discussant

Dr. Zuzanna Bogumił is a professor at The Institute of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology, University of Warsaw, Poland. She is an anthropologist and sociologist specializing in memory studies, with a particular focus on the memory of Soviet repressions and the entanglements between memory and religion in Central and Eastern Europe. Her published works include among others: More than Alive: The Dead, Orthodoxy and Remembrance in Post-Soviet Russia (with T. Voronina, Peter Lang, 2023), Milieux de mémoire in Late Modernity: Local Communities, Religion and Historical Politics (with M. Głowacka-Grajper, Peter Lang, 2019), and the co-edited volume Memory and Religion from a Postsecular Perspective (with. Y. Yurchuk, Routledge 2022), Gulag Memories: The Rediscovery and Commemoration of Russia’s Repressive Past (Berghahn Books, 2018).