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Recipient of the Victor and Rita Swoboda Memorial Scholarship, the Overseas Research Scholarship and the SSEES Excellence Scholarship
Supervisors: Dr Felix Ciuta, Prof Jan Kubik
Email: bohdana.kurylo.17@ucl.ac.uk
X/Twitter: @BohdanaKurylo
Present status: PhD Candidate (thesis submitted, awaiting viva)
Working title of thesis: Civil Society and the Politics of Security
Research: Civil society has been a noticeable blind spot in security studies despite the ongoing deepening of its agenda over recent decades. Against this background, this thesis develops the argument that civil society can be a meaningful security actor – not only in terms of conceptualising and providing security but especially through its positioning towards and relationship with other actors that contest the situated terrains of security.
To illustrate this argument, the dissertation explores how civil society participates in the politics of security in two specific contexts: reproductive health struggles in Poland and the Russo-Ukrainian war. Capturing these variegated enmeshments of civil society in security politics requires a contextualist analytical framework that focuses on and reformulates four pivotal categories underpinning these processes: civil society itself, security, empowerment and emergency. The analysis of both contexts shows a variable configuration of these elements. Central to each context, however, is the self-constitution of civil society as a plural security actor. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with Polish and Ukrainian civil society groups and hermeneutic textual analysis, I examine the conditions empowering them to act and mobilise in response to perceived emergencies. The result demonstrates that through spontaneous concerted action amidst the emancipatory moments of emergency, citizen groups laid claim to the very power they required to assert their presence in security politics. This presence reflected a varied understanding of security and practices associated with it, along with a multifaceted relationship between civil society, the state and the citizen.
This research contributes to the burgeoning corpus of critical security scholarship that seeks to decentre elite but also academic security knowledges by attending to marginalised subjectivities in non-Western contexts. It joins cross-disciplinary efforts to deepen the understanding of civil society’s multivalent role in the politics of security through a conceptually supple, empirically nuanced and normatively aware lens.
Research interests: critical security studies; post-Soviet politics; international political sociology; international relations theory; hermeneutics; social movements; gender; populism.
Teaching experience: I have accumulated five years of teaching experience across a range of universities: University College London, King’s College London, Queen Mary University of London and Oxford Brookes University. Most recently, I have served as a Teaching Fellow in International Relations at Oxford Brookes University, assuming the role of course convener for ‘Contemporary Security Studies’ (BA2), ‘Militarism and Society’ (BA3), ‘Security: Beyond Bullets and Bombs’ (MA) and ‘Critical Approaches to Terrorism’ (MA distance-learning). I am also an Associate Fellow of the UK Higher Education Academy.
Peer-reviewed publications:
Gaufman, E. & Kurylo, B., 2024. Ukraine in popular culture, Czech Journal of International Relations, 59(1), pp. 7-22
Kurylo, B., 2023. The Ukrainian subject, hierarchies of knowledge production and the everyday: An autoethnographic narrative. Journal of International Relations and Development, 26(4), pp. 685-697.
Kurylo, B., 2022. Emergency: A vernacular contextual approach. International Studies Review, 24(3), pp. 1-23.
Kurylo, B., 2022. Counter-populist performances of (in)security: Feminist resistance in the face of right-wing populism in Poland. Review of International Studies, 48(2), pp. 262-281.
Kurylo, B., 2022. The discourse and aesthetics of populism as securitisation style. International Relations, 36(1), pp. 127-147.
Kurylo, B., 2020. Technologised consumer culture: The Adorno–Benjamin debate and the reverse side of politicisation. Journal of Consumer Culture, 20(4), pp. 619-636.
Kurylo, B., 2017. Pornography and power in Michel Foucault’s thought. Journal of Political Power, 10(1), pp. 71-84.
Kurylo, B., 2016. Russia and Carl Schmitt: the hybridity of resistance in the globalised world. Humanities & Social Sciences Communications, 2(16096), pp. 1-9.
Awards:
Doctoral Paper Award, Association for the Study of Nationalities
Postgraduate Prize, British Association for Slavonic & East European Studies
Polish Studies Article Prize, British Association for Slavonic & East European Studies