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- Convenors:
-
Dmytro Yesypenko
(Kule Folklore Centre, University of Alberta)
Oleksandr Pankieiev (University of Alberta)
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Short Abstract
This panel explores how Ukrainian folklore and cultural narratives engage with nature—material and symbolic, domestic and diasporic, analog and digital—as a medium of memory, identity, and resilience. It considers nature as a dynamic site of narrative construction and cultural meaning-making.
Long Abstract
The panel considers how diverse notions of nature—understood ecologically, symbolically, affectively, and digitally—shape and are shaped by Ukrainian folklore and narrative traditions. From archival transformations to supernatural presences, from wartime songs to diasporic performance, nature emerges as more than backdrop: it is a co-actor in narrative practices that articulate identity, memory, and collective experience.
Narratives of nature serve both as tools of cultural preservation and transformation, connecting local, transnational, and diasporic contexts. Ukrainian folklore, whether transmitted orally, archived materially, performed on international stages, or shared via digital platforms, engages a complex spectrum of nature(s): from ancestral landscapes and mythic figures to household spirits and wounded ecologies. These nature-inflected narratives also respond to broader disruptions—war, displacement, institutional change, and technological mediation—reframing how communities experience, remember, and imagine the world around them.
The panel encompasses a wide range of Ukrainian contexts, including the role of ritual and landscape in song traditions, the depiction of nonhuman encounters in domestic folklore, the reconfiguration of archives as evolving ecological systems, the cosmological logic of sacrifice in traditional balladry, and the symbolic function of nature imagery in media performance. It reflects on how folklore and archival narratives act as living environments that preserve and reshape collective memory.
Accepted papers
Session 1 Tuesday 16 June, 2026, -Paper short abstract
The “Walled-Up Wife” ballad, found across Eastern Europe, tells of a structure that will not stand until a woman is immured in its foundations. This paper highlights Ukrainian variants, showing how the ballad form reveals the cosmological rationale of foundation sacrifice.
Paper long abstract
The ballad of the “Walled-Up Wife,” attested in more than 700 versions across Eastern Europe (with notable parallels in India), situates narrative at the intersection of human initiative and nonhuman forces. In its core plot, a group of men attempts to construct a vital structure – a fortress, a bridge, a monastery, or city walls – yet whatever is built during the day collapses by the next morning. Only when a young woman, most often the wife of one of the builders, is immured within the foundations does the structure endure. Beliefs in the necessity of human sacrifice at construction sites, corroborated by archaeological discoveries and by their long afterlife in ritual, superstition, and children’s folklore, are defined in anthropological and folklore studies as foundation sacrifice. This paper revisits key interpretations of the foundation sacrifice and argues that the ballad tradition provides a distinct perspective on its cosmological rationale. Alongside representative international variants of the “Walled-Up Wife,” the analysis foregrounds Ukrainian material, particularly the ballad "Zamurovana myla" (“The Immured Beloved”), in which immurement is not tied to construction. The paper suggests that the ballad form refracts the foundation sacrifice as an expression of the conflict between human initiative and the natural order, a conflict that the genre reveals as irreconcilable.
Paper short abstract
The paper looks into narrating the uncanny in a context of Ukrainian war refugees in Estonia. It concentrates on sleep paralysis experience and narratives that appear in relation to it. The interpretation of those manifestations is placed in a transferable identity that travels along with refugees.
Paper long abstract
A household spirit domovyk is a popular figure in Ukrainian folklore that in book-cases appears during sleep paralysis to warn or hides something just for fun. However, experience centred narrating dimension goes far beyond these manifestations and places domovyk in the center of theorising and making sense of the other supernatural encounters that occur in home environment. He becomes a focal point for understanding the household-related experiences.
The paper looks closely into narrating the uncanny in a context of Ukrainian war refugees in Estonia. The experiences presented in the paper are the examples of sleep paralysis and narratives that appear in relation to or as a continuation of it. The interpretations of those manifestations are placed into a transferable identity that travels along with refugees and explains encounters through the familiar optics. The paper is based on a fieldwork material obtained in 2025 in Estonia.
Paper short abstract
In my presentation, I examine the transfer of archival collections in Edmonton, Canada, from the Ukrainian Canadian Archives and Museum of Alberta to the Bohdan Medwidsky Ukrainian Folklore Archives, and how UCAMA’s rich historical holdings reshape BMUFA’s mission, narrative, and accessibility.
Paper long abstract
My presentation is about the history of two Ukrainian Canadian archival institutions in Edmonton, Canada: the Bohdan Medwidsky Ukrainian Folklore Archives (BMUFA) and the Ukrainian Canadian Archives and Museum of Alberta (UCAMA). In 2020, UCAMA closed and donated its extensive archival collection to BMUFA. I will explore how the incorporation of these collections reshaped BMUFA’s narrative, mission, and accessibility.
The UCAMA was founded as a non-profit institution dedicated to preserving the culture and history of the first Ukrainian settlers in Alberta. Its founders, Hryhory and Stephania Yopyk, understood “culture” in a broad sense. As a result, they collected personal belongings, clothing from Ukrainian families, artworks, documents, newspapers, magazines, books—essentially anything that could be considered part of Ukrainian heritage. A particular emphasis was placed on historical memory, especially on materials related to World War I.
In contrast, BMUFA, founded at the University of Alberta, was built on academic principles. Its focus lies in documenting, preserving, and interpreting Ukrainian and Ukrainian Canadian folklore across Canada, prioritizing personal stories, migration experiences, and oral traditions.
The transfer of UCAMA’s collections introduced a rich local historical narrative into BMUFA’s primarily folklore-focused framework. This integration broadened and complicated BMUFA’s original narrative, prompting a re-examination of its mission and leading to significant changes in strategies of accessibility.
This case contributes to broader discussions on the transformation of archival narratives and the ethics of cultural and historical memory, showing how shifting institutional contexts redefine what is preserved, how it is described, and how it is remembered.
Paper short abstract
This presentation demonstrates how Ukraine’s landscape is imagined and portrayed in the repertoire of Ukrainian Bandurist Chorus of North America, and how these sung borders continue to reinforce a deep understanding of Ukraine’s geography in the context of Russian war against Ukraine.
Paper long abstract
While the physical borders of the countries shift, the image of their cultural borders stays – in the stories people share, and in the songs they sing. Additionally, cultural knowledge of the lands is reflected in the musical repertoire and its depiction of these regions. This presentation demonstrates how Ukraine’s landscape and borders are imagined and portrayed in the repertoire of Ukrainian Bandurist Chorus of North America, and how these sung borders continue to reinforce a deep understanding of Ukraine’s geography in the context of Russian war against Ukraine, from the diasporic perspective.
Paper short abstract
This paper explores how Ukrainian musicians respond to wartime ecocide through songs that blend environmental awareness, cultural memory, and activism. Through lyrics, visuals, and fundraising efforts, they transform music into a medium of ecological and humanitarian resilience.
Paper long abstract
This paper examines how the Ukrainian popular music scene engages with ecological devastation—ecocide—as both subject and symbol in the context of Russia’s full-scale invasion after 2022. Drawing on recent songs, videos, and public campaigns by Ukrainian artists, I show how music functions as a powerful medium of environmental witnessing and resilience.
In the wake of massive destruction of ecosystems, forests, rivers, and farmlands, Ukrainian singers have been creating songs that foreground the interconnection between human and wildlife suffering and the wounded landscape. These works merge affective storytelling with activism: by involving documentary pictures and sounds of the destructions, they visualize scorched fields, polluted waters, and blackened skies while raising funds for environmental and humanitarian relief. Through their digital circulation on YouTube, Instagram, and Telegram, these songs operate as ecological counter-narratives to wartime disinformation, foregrounding the agency of nature as both victim and witness of violence. These artists transform ecological catastrophe into a shared space of mourning, solidarity, and hope—recasting music as a site of environmental memory and resistance.
By situating the contemporary Ukrainian popular music scene within broader folklore and narrative traditions that personify nature as a moral and affective force, this paper argues that wartime music performs a plural function: it commemorates loss while simultaneously envisioning and mobilizing regeneration.