Deadly Care: What HIV Policies Reveal about Russia’s Colonial Logic During the Invasion of Ukraine (2014-ongoing)

A lecture by Dafna Rachok, Assistant Professor of Anthropology, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Moderated by Emily Channell-Justice, Director, Temerty Contemporary Ukraine Program.

IN-PERSON and ONLINE via Zoom Webinar (live). Registration is required to attend online.

About the Lecture

This talk critically examines what HIV policies unveil about the questions of governance, sovereignty, and care. In particular, it focuses on the situation of people living with HIV in eastern Ukraine since 2014 and up to now. By exploring how treatment programs were organized on the Russia-occupied territories and tracing various legislative changes, this talk zooms in on the process of imposition of citizenship: how a sick body of a (colonial) subject becomes a site where an invading power asserts its control and the right to let live or let die. This talk ends by discussing how Russian colonial logic of subjugation and assimilation disguises itself as the logic of care for the vulnerable.

About the Speaker

Dafna Rachok is an Assistant Professor of medical anthropology at UNC Chapel Hill. Her research sits at the intersections of global health, anthropology, gender and sexuality studies, and Ukrainian studies. Through these intersections, she explores patient community-building, unintended consequences of global health interventions, medical humanitarianism, and state-citizens relations. She received her PhD in Anthropology from Indiana University Bloomington in 2024. Her current project, Affective Belonging: Vulnerable Groups’ Political Subjectivity and HIV in Ukraine explores what underpins the strength of a public health system in a supposedly weak post-socialist state. It centers on political mobilization of Ukrainian vulnerable communities (people living with HIV, sex workers, people who use drugs) as citizens through their interactions with the state public health bureaucracy. Her next project is an interdisciplinary inquiry into the categorial relationality of medical humanitarianism as a traveling technology in the context of rebuilding and modernization of TB infrastructure in war-affected Ukraine. 

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This event is organized by Harvard's Ukrainian Research Institute (HURI) as part of the Seminar in Ukrainian Studies event series and Temerty Contemporary Ukraine Program.

Persons with disabilities who wish to request accommodations or who have questions about access, please contact Hanna Leliv, HURI Events Logistics Coordinator, at hleliv@fas.harvard.edu at least two weeks in advance of the session.

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