GRANTEE
This project documents how municipal social workers in Ukraine sustain social care provision amid war, austerity, and chronic underfunding. Through institutional ethnography and participant observation, Nataliia Lomonosova explores how frontline workers navigate scarcity, stretch institutional limits, and invent informal strategies to keep essential services functioning.
Building on the first phase of Lomonosova’s PhD research, the grant will support on-site fieldwork in several communities across Ukraine. By tracing how care workers improvise, reorder their time, and uphold relationships in disrupted conditions, the project reveals the often invisible labor through which resilience and the welfare state itself is sustained.