Thinking through positionality in post-socialist politics: Researching contemporary social movements in Ukraine.

This article argues that heterogeneity among leftist political activists in Ukraine creates new spaces for investigation of social movements in post-socialist spaces. It suggests that the researcher's positionality impacts how this diversity is seen, interpreted, and analyzed. Drawing from scholarship on engaged anthropology and ethnographic research during the 2013-2014 Euromaidan mobilizations, I show how fragmentation among leftists had a dual influence, sometimes encouraging leftists to move beyond difference to avoid alienation, and other times creating greater fractures that limited the creation of alternative social projects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]