VIKTORIA LAVRINIUK

Reading Sara Ahmed’s Living a Feminist Life during one of my PhD classes eventually became a book, helping to define who I am as a researcher, a feminist researcher. I place women and systemic gender discrimination in institutions at the heart of my research work.

For my PhD thesis, I concentrate on women narrating their stories of engaging in institutional work on dismantling a violent order in Belarus, my native country, stories that are inextricably intertwined with mine. This extremely intimate and politically charged auto/ethnographic journey aims to shed light on the ways in which women’s collective agency has made it possible to fight the violent state apparatus on the streets and the prisons