Sophie Schmäing
Post-Doctoral Researcher
Sophie Schmäing is a political sociologist with a focus on democracy and participatory processes, forced migration and digital ethnography. Her regional focus is on Eastern Europe. She is particularly interested in how encounters between the state and citizens shape citizenship in these contexts. She earned her PhD from Justus Liebig University Giessen, Germany, in 2023. Her doctoral dissertation on urban democracy in post-Maidan Ukraine was awarded the Klaus Mehnert Prize by the German Association for Eastern European Studies (DGO), as well as a dissertation prize from the University of Giessen. A graduate of Martin-Luther-Universität Halle (Saale) and of Freie Universität Berlin, she also studied and worked at the Universities of Poznań and Kharkiv. She was a research associate at the University of Giessen, a postdoctoral fellow at Freie Universität Berlin, and a coordinator supporting Ukrainian refugee scholars through the Prisma Ukraïna programme of Forum Transregionale Studien Berlin. Since May 2025, she has been a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Greifswald’s Interdisciplinary Centre for Baltic Sea Region Research (IFZO). As a member of the ‘Horizon Europe’ consortium MAGnituDe, she is exploring the consequences of mass migration caused by Russia’s war on Ukraine for European democracy.
Journal articles (peer-reviewed):
Sophie Schmäing. From reconfiguring the urban space to resisting Russia’s war: local civic engagement in Ukraine since 2014, in: Post-Soviet Affairs, first view. https://doi.org/10.1080/1060586X.2025.2491969.
Schmäing, Sophie. Urban democracy in post-Maidan Ukraine: conflict and cooperation between citizens and local governments in participatory budgeting, in: European Societies 26, 2024, no.2, p. 230–52. doi:10.1080/14616696.2023.2183972.
Schmäing, Sophie: “Dictatorship of Applause”? The Rise of Direct Representation in Contemporary Ukraine, in: Topos. Journal for Philosophy and Cultural Studies, 2021, no.1, p.11-31.
Special Issues:
Langenohl, Andreas; Schmäing, Sophie (Eds.): Voting over Contested Issues – Voting as a Contested Issue, Special issue, Topos. Journal for Philosophy and Cultural Studies, 2021, no.1.
Reviews, Reports, Blogposts:
Photographers are very eloquent speakers” – A Conversation with Jessica Zychowicz and Mariia Kravchenko on the exhibition Ukraine: War and Resistance, in: TRAFO – Blog for Transregional Research, 07.09.2023, https://trafo.hypotheses.org/48669.
Tragedy and Normalcy: Documenting Russia’s War on Ukraine – An Interview with Photographer Brendan Hoffman, in: TRAFO – Blog for Transregional Research, 08.08.2023, https://trafo.hypotheses.org/48208.
Schmäing, Sophie: “In Search of a Common Political Project: Understanding Ukraine’s Post-Soviet Path”, in: KULT_online, 2020, no. 61 (April).
Schmäing, Sophie: “Rethinking Ukrainian Studies”: Serhy Yekelchyk’s keynote lecture “Writing the history of revolution in the time of war”, in: TRAFO – Blog for Transregional Research, 22.08.2019, https://trafo.hypotheses.org/19478.
Schmäing, Sophie: Konferenzbericht zur DGO-Jahrestagung: „Über Revolutionen: Ursachen, Versprechen, Folgen, 16.03.2017 - 17.03.2017 Berlin.“. In: H-Soz-Kult, 17.06.2017, www.hsozkult.de/conferencereport/id/tagungsberichte-7208.