Resistance and Care: Belarusian Disability and Pensioners’ Communities in Exile

• In Event: Belarus IV: Dispossession and Disruption: Belarusian Professional, Religious, and Vulnerable Communities in Exile

Abstract

The paper narrates stories of the Belarusian self-organized communities of care and resistance in exile. While much has been said about the diversity of the 2020 uprising in Belarus (Shparaga, 2021, Bedford, 2021; Gapova, 2021), few research projects focus on disability and pensioners communities who joined street marches and, after large-scale repressions and intensive waves of forced migration, found themselves in precarious conditions with disrupted kinship connections. I focus on care and cultural production (Shparaga, 2021; Vozyanov, 2021; Stebur, 2023) as central for understanding how vulnerable communities rebuild support networks in exile. Relying on the ethnographic data collected in Poland and Lithuania where these communities settled, the paper shows how interdependence and establishing blurring boundaries between giving and receiving care enable new modes of mutual support but also produce silencing and coercive hierarchies of care in the communities’ narratives, specifically, in the stories of female pensioners. Although experiencing precarious conditions of living, female pensioners in exile prioritize care “for the youth” (e.g. their children, grandchildren, young activists) and support of people and political prisoners in Belarus. The research adds to the existing body of knowledge on how vulnerable communities encounter political and social crises and builds nuanced understanding of aging and disability experiences in the context of anti-authoritarian and anti-war resistance. Despite the commonly shared beliefs in pensioners’ and persons with disability loyal attitudes to the paternalistic state in Belarus, the ethnographic interviews and secondary data reveal diverse trajectories of the community members belonging to the protest movement in the country over time, including, earlier waves of resistance mobilized before the 2020 uprising. The project maps disability communities and pensioners’ self-organizing networks of support in exile and shows how they are connected to or excluded from the infrastructures of care and resistance built by the broader Belarusian protest networks, and trans-local activist organizing.

Author

• Volha Verbilovich, U of Massachusetts Amherst