Ukrainian Environmental Humanities Network
Ukraine is home to a diverse range of environments, including the richly biodiverse wetlands of Polissya (known as ‘Europe’s Amazon’) in the north, the expansive grassland steppe in the east, and lowland forests and alpine meadows in the Carpathians to the west. Ukraine is also home to one of the world’s worst environmental catastrophes (the Chornobyl nuclear disaster), is commonly known as the ‘breadbasket of Europe’, and is a country scarred by imperial forms of resourcification in the eastern Donbas region (see Bazdyrieva, 2022).
Since February 24th 2022, Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine has involved ecocide as a companion to genocide, bringing devastation to environments and people across the country (see Andrianova, 2022; Perga, 2022). Global reliance on environmentally-destructive Russian oil and gas has prevented the international community from fully isolating Russia and supporting Ukraine to reclaim all its occupied territories (Radynski, 2022). Ukrainians, meanwhile, have shown immense resilience, amidst which, deep-rooted connections to land and landscape have begun to re-emerge (see Iakovlenko, 2022).
Environmental topics have gained increased visibility in both Ukrainian public discourse and the Ukrainian art and cultural spheres since the 2014 Russian invasion of Crimea and the Donetsk and Luhansk regions in Ukraine’s east. This can be attributed to both greater global awareness of the interlinked climate and biodiversity crises, but also to a growing desire for, and conversation around, Ukrainian decolonisation. Scholars, artists, and activists have shown an interest in Ukraine’s environments, their specificities, uniqueness, and the way Russia’s military actions constitute ecocide. Such work represents a form of resilience against the aggressor.
Tanya Richardson and Darya Tsymbalyuk (2022) describe how mainstream (anglophone) environmental humanities scholarship has largely bypassed Ukraine, or tends to pigeon-hole the country as a ‘(post)Soviet ruin’ by focusing solely on events like Chornobyl. As a group of early career researchers, designers, artists, and curators with a shared interest in Ukrainian environments, we agree. Accordingly, we believe there is an urgent need to shine a light on, advance, and support the production of knowledge, art, and exhibitions relating to the Ukrainian Environmental Humanities (see Semchuk, 2022; Tsymbalyuk, 2022). As such, we have established the Ukrainian Environmental Humanities Network as a community and space to gather and share ideas, promote and support work, and enable and encourage collaboration within Ukraine and beyond.
We envision this network as thoroughly interdisciplinary, and hope to bring ecologists into conversation with geographers, artists into conversation with journalists, and curators into conversation with anthropologists, spanning the gap between social and natural science, but also between academia and art. If you want to get involved, please contact us at ukrainianenvhum@gmail.com.
To launch the network, we are organising an online seminar series that will run between May and July 2023. We will cover the following themes: Ecocide, Food and Agriculture, Chornobyl, Kyiv’s urban ecologies. Follow us on Twitter (@ukrenvhum) to keep up to date with our news and events: https://twitter.com/UkrEnvHum.
Our seminar series is kindly supported by IZOLYATSIA, the New Democracy Fund by the Danish Cultural Institute, and the Ukrainian Institute London, and we’ve partnered with the Department of Ukrainian Studies at the University of Warsaw and the Institute for East European Studies at the Freie Universität Berlin. We’re very grateful to these supporters and partners and hope these conversations contribute to the emergence of research, artworks, and activism in these areas.
FOUNDING MEMBERS
Dmytro Chepurnyi is a Luhansk-born independent curator based in Kyiv. He is a co-editor of the 'Curatorial Handbook', together with Kateryna Iakovlenko and Oleksandra Pogrebnyak, and a co-author of the book 'Limits of Collaboration: Art, Ethics, and Donbas', with Victoria Donovan and Darya Tsymbalyuk. Dmytro will moderate the seminar on Kyiv Urban Ecologies.
Oleksandra Pogrebnyak is a Kyiv-based curator. She is the co-editor of the Curatorial Handbook with Dmytro and Kateryna Iakovlenko. Since 2020, she has held the position of Junior Curator at the PinchukArtCentre. Her latest curatorial projects were an apartment exhibition entitled 'Thickets, Groves, Woods and Bushes', and group exhibitions “United. PinchukArtCentre Prize 2022” and “the Future Generation Art Prize 2021”. Oleksandra together with Karolina will moderate the seminar on Food and Agriculture.
Karolina Uskakovych is a multidisciplinary artist, designer and filmmaker, as well as the art director of the magazine, Anthroposphere: Oxford Climate review. She is an artist in residency for the Digital Ecologies research group and holds a residency with D6: culture in transit and IZOLYATSIA in the UK. Karolina’s research and practice examines the entanglement of nature, culture, and technology and she is currently researching Ukrainian traditional ecological knowledge.
Ewa Sułek is an art historian, curator, and writer who received her PhD in Ukrainian contemporary art from the Nicolaus Copernicus University in Poland. Her postdoc position at Harvard and the Freie Universität Berlin will involve research on the landscape of Donbas, as presented in visual arts.
Jonathon Turnbull is a cultural and environmental geographer at the University of Oxford. His PhD research examines how understandings of nature are produced and contested in the Chornobyl Exclusion Zone, Ukraine. Alongside his academic work, he is co-producing a film about the dogs of Chornobyl and those that care for them. He tweets @jonnyjjt.
WORKS CITED ABOVE
Andrianova, A. 2022. Russia’s War on the Nonhuman. NYU Jordan Center for the Advanced Study of Russia [online], 21st April. Available from: https://jordanrussiacenter.org/news/russias-war-on-the-nonhuman/.
Bazdryieva, A. 2022. No Milk, No Love. E-Flux Journal [online], #127. Available from: https://www.eflux.com/journal/127/465214/no-milk-no-love/.
Iakovlenko, K. 2022. Landscape, Decolonial and Ukrainian Resistance. blok [online], 28th March. Available from: http://blokmagazine.com/landscape-decolonial-and-ukrainian-resistance/.
Perga, T. 2022. Ecocide in Ukraine: How Russia’s War Will Poison the Country (and Europe) for Decades to Come. De Gruyter Conversations: Politics and Society [online], 30th June. Available from: https://blog.degruyter.com/ecocide-in-ukraine-how-russias-war-will-poison-the-country-and-europe-for-decades-to-come/.
Radynski, O. 2022. Nord Stream Studies. Against Catastrophe [online], 18th June. Available from: https://againstcatastrophe.net/dispatch-1/nord-stream-studies.
Richardson, T. and Tsymbalyuk, D. 2022. Environmental Humanities, Ukrainian Studies: It’s time to talk. NiCHE [online], 25th November. Available from: https://niche-canada.org/2022/11/25/environmental-humanities-ukrainian-studies-its-time-to-talk/#Notes.
Semchuk, L. 2022. Beyond Anthropocentrism in Ukrainian Studies: Proposals from the Environmental Humanities. Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences [online], 18th May. Available from: https://www.federationhss.ca/en/blog/beyond-anthropocentrism-ukrainian-studies-proposals-environmental-humanities.
Tsymbalyuk, D. 2022. What Does It Mean to Study Environments in Ukraine Now? Environment & Society Portal, Arcadia, no.12. Available from: https://www.environmentandsociety.org/arcadia/what-does-it-mean-study-environments-ukraine-now.