Congratulations to Kimberlee Nesbitt on her recent PhD proposal defense! Dissertation Title: ““Fix [your] hearts or die!”: The ethics of care and the question of reproductive security in Ukraine.”
“Since Russia’s invasion in 2014, the international security arena has struggled to account for the intimate, embodied consequences of war, particularly as it relates to experiences of social and embodied reproduction in Ukraine. My project addresses this notable silence by examining how reproductive care practices, decision-making, and relationships are being transformed under conditions of defensive war and prolonged occupation. Drawing on Sara Ruddick’s concept of maternal thinking and the ethics of care, I argue that caregiving during conflict is not merely a practice of survival but a form of unique, situated knowledge – one capable of destabilizing dominant security and global health logics.
Through an extended feminist case study grounded in narrative ethnographic analysis, I engage Ukrainian wartime diaries and poetry to trace how reproductive actors – be they mothers, midwives, surrogates, or the other care networks in between – make sense of and respond to the fractures of war. These texts do more than document trauma; they serve as ethical encounters that reveal the affective labour, moral reasoning, and agency embedded in practices of care. Finally, my project situates these dynamics of care against the backdrop of Russian imperial aggression and Western neoliberal governance, wherein Ukraine’s colonial in-betweenness further shapes the moral dilemmas of caregiving.”
Kim’s project is co-supervised by Dr. Fiona Robinson and Dr. Brian C. Schmidt; Dr. Valerie Percival serves as third reader.