Sophie Schmäing
Post-Doctoral Researcher
Sophie Schmäing is a political sociologist with a research focus on Eastern Europe. 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 received her PhD from Justus-Liebig-Universität Giessen in 2023 for a thesis exploring how (dis)trust in collective political processes shaped urban participation and democracy in post-Maidan Ukraine. She was a research associate at the University of Gießen, a post-doctoral fellow at Freie Universität Berlin and worked at 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” Project Migration, Affective Geopolitics, and European Democracy in Times of Military Conflicts, she studies the influence of arrival infrastructures for forcefully displaced Ukrainians in Germany on affective citizenship.
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.