The Honorary Feminist Sociologist Distinction, established in 2021, is presented annually to honor the contributions of feminists who are not sociologists to the field of Feminist Sociology. This initiative recognizes the inherent interdisciplinary character of feminist theory and praxis and how it has been fundamental to the development of feminist sociology. The work by feminists like bell hooks, Audre Lorde, Angela Davis, Gloria Anzaldúa, Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, and Maria Lugones, to name just a few, has been of great influence to our field by revealing nuances and complexities of social processes from angles that sometimes escape sociological research. This award offers an “Honorary Feminist Sociology Distinction” to scholars and activists that have allowed Feminist Sociology to grow and foregrounds the cross-disciplinary links of Feminist Sociology.
The President-Elect selects the annual recipient of the Honorary Feminist Sociologist Distinction and invites the awardee to participate at the SWS Winter Meeting to foster constructive interdisciplinary relationships among feminists who are devoted to advancing gender and sexual justice as well as dismantling intersecting systems of oppression.
The 2024 SWS Honorary Feminist Sociologist Distinction is awarded to Dr. Maria Mayerchyk, selected by S.L. Crawley, SWS President-Elect. Past awardees include Dr. Ochy Curiel (2022) and Dr. Sharon Harley (2023).
Dr. Maria Mayerchyk is a feminist academic and activist from Ukraine. She has a double affiliation as a Deputy Professor of Social Anthropology at Rhine-Waal University of Applied Sciences (Germany) and a Senior Research Associate at the Ethnology Institute of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine.
In 2003, she obtained a Candidate of Sciences degree (= PhD) in History, specializing in Ethnology. Later, she held an academic position at the University of Alberta (2019-2020) and was a visiting scholar at the Ukrainian Research Institute at Harvard University (2012), Lund University (2019), the University of Greifswald (2022-2023), as well as held postdocs at the University of South Florida (2007-2008) and the University of Alberta (2008-2009). Maria’s research interests include a decolonial perspective on gender, sexuality and body, queer and feminist movements and epistemologies of Eastern Europe, diaspora and migration studies, and folklore and traditional knowledge.
She is a co-founder and editor-in-chief of the refereed open-access journal Feminist Critique: East European Journal of Feminist and Queer Studies (2015-now), which provides a platform for feminist knowledge production and encourages debates on socially important issues related to Eastern Europe among global scholarly and activist communities.
In 2011–2014, she was the principal investigator on the Gender, Sexuality, and Power project supported by the Open Society Foundation.
Maria has authored/edited seven books, numerous journal articles, and special issues. Her current monograph, Coloniality of the Indecent: Erotic Folklore in the Modern Design of Sexuality, as well as her previous book Ritual and the Body: Ukrainian Rites of Passage (first published in 2011), are being translated into English.
Maria’s articles have been translated into Chinese, Croatian, English, Georgian, German, Polish, and Russian. Her most recent publications, co-authored with Olga Plakhotnik, include “Pride Contested. Geopolitics of Liberation at the Buffer Periphery of Europe” (Lambda Nordica, 2023), “What is Guarded in Toilets? On Transphobia, Citizenship and Militarisation” (Femina Politica, 2023) and “Uneventful Feminist Protest in Post-Maidan Ukraine: Nation and Coloniality Revisited” (Postcolonial and Postsocialist Dialogues, ed. by R. Koobak, M. Tlostanova, & S. Thapar-Björkert. Routledge, 2021).
Maria will be a participant on a 2024 SWS Winter Meeting Plenary: Transnational Feminist Resistance to “Anti-Gender” Politics and Authoritarianism which will be on Friday, January 26, 2024 from 1:30 pm – 3:00 pm.
We hope you will join us in congratulating Dr. Maria Mayerchyk, and that you will make plans to join us for the 2024 Winter Meeting Awards Banquet and Reception to be held on Saturday, January 27. Please register here for the 2024 Winter Meeting where you will have the opportunity to attend this celebration.