Half-Lives and Healthy Bodies: Discourses on Contaminated Food and Healing in Postchernobyl Ukraine

For food space: theorizing alternative food networks beyond alterity

“…While the Soviet-backed regimes and their successors differed with respect to the implementation of agricultural collectivization and the nationalization of land and resources, and in the 1990s, decollectivization, privatization and liberalization, these processes have left lingering imprints on rural landscapes, land use and food systems (Creed 1998;Duijzings 2013;Hann 2003;Lieskovský et al 2014;Schwartz 2005;Verdery 1996). Although the negative environmental impacts of Sovietstyle development were well-documented, most notably in the Chernobyl disaster (Phillips 2002), new problems have arisen and some persistent environmental issues have lingered since the collapse of the Soviet Union and its supported regimes in the former Warsaw Pact countries (Galbreath 2013;Pavlínek and Pickles 2002;Smith et al 2000). The privatization of natural resources, from agricultural land to forests, was supposed to lead to more efficient use of resources and sustainable development; political ecologists writing about the region have documented the opposite tendency (Dorondel 2016;Stahl 2012).…”

Informal Economies in Post-Socialist Spaces

“…The ongoing Chernobyl disaster has recently become the focus of scholarship in social science and humanities fields such as human geography (Davies, 2013(Davies, , 2015Rush-Cooper, 2013), sociology (Kuchinskaya, 2010(Kuchinskaya, , 2013(Kuchinskaya, , 2014Morris-Suzuki, 2014), history (Geist, 2015;Kalmbach, 2013;Marples, 2004;Schmid, 2015), area studies and anthropology (Arndt, 2012;Petryna, 2002Petryna, , 2011Phillips, 2005;Phillips and Ostaszewski, 2012), as well as visual studies (Bürkner, 2014), literature studies (Gerstenberger, 2014) and tourism (Stone, 2013;Yankovska and Hannam, 2014). These researchers share the realization that the Chernobyl accident has diverse understandings and multiple realities, with disputed impacts that extend well beyond its official nuclear geography and its enigmatic death toll.…”

Locating Purity within Corruption Rumors: Narratives of HPV Vaccination Refusal in a Peri‐urban Community of Southern Romania

“…The popular belief that human reproduction has been affected by radioactive contamination is relatively widespread in Eastern European countries, including Ukraine (Petryna ; Philips ), Bulgaria (Kaneff ), and Hungary (Harper ). The medical and public health reports concerning the reproductive consequences of exposure to Chernobyl radiation, however, are contradictory .…”