Click the star to add/remove an item to/from your individual schedule.
You need to be logged in to avail of this functionality.
Log in
- Convenors:
-
Anna Olenenko
(University of Alberta)
Oleksandr Pankieiev (University of Alberta)
Send message to Convenors
- Chairs:
-
Anna Olenenko
(University of Alberta)
Oleksandr Pankieiev (University of Alberta)
Short Abstract
This panel explores how narratives of war reflect and reframe human-environment relations, revealing new ways of thinking about nature under conditions of violence and rupture, and how storytelling challenges anthropocentrism and reimagines the non-human world.
Long Abstract
During the ongoing war, the non-human world—animals, plants, rivers, landscapes, and so on—has emerged as an active presence in both personal and media narratives in Ukraine and worldwide. While humans remain central to storytelling, the visibility of the non-human has increased significantly. Stories focus on the non-human world in different ways: as victims of war, as companions, and as symbols embedded in national identity. Many wartime narratives depict non-human suffering—burning steppes, dead wildlife, and ecological disasters—and are often framed as ecocide. Others show bonds formed in crisis: soldiers adopting animals, civilians rescuing pets. Nature becomes a symbol of resilience, with revived wetlands after the destruction of the Kakhovka HES and famous animal heroes embodying national strength, challenging anthropocentric worldviews and human exceptionalism.
Through this lens, the panel asks:
How does war transform the narrative role of nature in contemporary storytelling?
What is the place of the non-human in today’s narratives of war?
What historical environmental narratives are reactivated or reconfigured in the present?
How are these stories constructed, and what narrative forms do they take?
What exactly from the non-human world is represented - and why?
Can narrative serve as a form of ecological preservation or recovery?
How is the environment woven into national narratives of identity and resistance?
We invite applicants to submit proposals to this panel, which explores how contemporary narratives of war reflect and reframe the relationships between humans and the environment, revealing new ways of thinking about nature under conditions of violence and rupture.
Accepted papers
Session 1 Saturday 13 June, 2026, -Paper short abstract
Based on oral histories of Vilcha residents displaced after Chornobyl and again by war, the paper explores how narratives of nature function as symbolic resources shaping memory, identity, and survival strategies.
Paper long abstract
The paper explores how narratives about nature among people displaced from the Chornobyl exclusion zone are revived and reinterpreted in the testimonies of the same individuals during the full-scale war and the repeated loss of their homes. Nature is examined both as a factor shaping experience and worldview in times of crisis, and as a symbolic resource for making sense of trauma and sustaining survival.
The analysis is based on oral history interviews recorded in 2016, 2017, and 2025 with residents of Vilcha in Kharkiv region. Located only 11 km from the Russian border, Vilcha has been almost completely destroyed by military action. For most inhabitants, this marked a second loss of home: the first resettlement followed the Chornobyl disaster, when they were forced to leave their native Polissya.
The narratives of those twice displaced consistently highlight nature as a source of strength, memory, and belonging. Recollections of flower gardens, orchards, and vegetable plots play a key role in restoring a sense of continuity and stability. After the first displacement, people sought to recreate familiar spaces through gardens and yards, while also engaging with the natural environment of their new settlement. The war’s destruction of these recreated spaces represents not only material loss but also the collapse of symbolic homes and everyday stability.
The study shows that in the memories and practices of Vilcha residents, nature emerges as an active presence—a repository of memory, a symbol of home, and a crucial support in the experience of repeated forced displacement.
Paper short abstract
After the 2023 Kakhovka HES destruction, debates on the Dnipro wetlands mobilize historical narratives framing them as symbolic and nationally significant landscapes, which are evolving into environmental narratives advocating conservation, protection, and ecological recovery.
Paper long abstract
The destruction of the Kakhovka Hydroelectric Station in June 2023 during the Russo-Ukrainian war resulted not only in human losses and ecological devastation but also revived historical debates about the construction of the Kakhovka Reservoir in the 1950s, which submerged vast areas of the Dnipro wetlands (plavni). Now, as the reservoir has drained and we witness a remarkable revival of wetland ecosystems, those debates have been supplemented by new discussions about the future of this landscape. Within these discussions, Ukrainian society is divided into two opposing groups: one argues for rebuilding the reservoir to support the postwar economy, while the other insists that restoring the hydroconstruction would once again flood the wetlands, which were not merely sources of economic livelihood but have long been integral to the cultural fabric and national identity of Ukrainians. This paper argues that current debates over the future of the Dnipro wetlands mobilize historical narratives that frame them as symbolic and nationally significant landscape. I suggest that such historical narratives, which emphasize the wetlands as an integral part of Ukrainian national identity, are gradually evolving into environmental narratives that call for conservation, environmental protection, and ecological recovery of the Dnipro wetlands.
Paper short abstract
This paper explores narrative strategies for adapting traumatic war experiences for сhildren audiences, fostering simultaneously responsibility for nature’s protection alongside patriotism, empathy, love for the motherland, and humanistic values.
Paper long abstract
The Russian war against Ukraine is accompanied by violence against nature and ecocide. Yet an important question arises: how can we tell children about this violence against nature? This paper examines various narrative strategies that enable the adaptation of the traumatic war experience for young audiences, while also cultivating their sense of responsibility for protecting the natural environment.
The first example is related to the use of fairy tales. As a case study, an Estonian project is presented in which the author writes and illustrates stories about war and nature, depicting the interaction of Ukrainian soldiers with animals and the natural world on the front line. This format can serve both therapeutic purposes and educational practices that nurture values of kindness, compassion, humanism, and care for the environment. Moreover, it portrays Ukrainian soldiers as heroes and defenders in a broader sense—not only of Ukrainian land and people but also of its environment and wildlife.
The second mode of representation is connected with visual narratives - animation. The paper analyzes a children’s cartoon about a Patron dog, which illustrates how wartime realities, concern for nature, and issues of safety during the war can be transformed into images and narrations accessible to children.
Thus, the paper demonstrates how stories about war and violence against nature can be adapted for young audiences, becoming not only a means of overcoming traumatic experience but also a tool for fostering patriotism, love for the motherland, empathy, humanistic values, and ecological awareness.
Paper short abstract
During the 1990s Kosovo political crisis, nature became a symbol of resistance for Albanians excluded from institutions. Land, animals, and farming offered not only survival but dignity, memory, and belonging, redefining the bond with place beyond the state in a time of repression and uncertainty.
Paper long abstract
In the early 1990s, following the breakup of Yugoslavia and the rise of a repressive Serbian regime in Kosovo, Albanians faced systematic exclusion from employment, education, healthcare, and public institutions. Alongside political repression, this exclusion created profound economic and social insecurity. In this context of institutional alienation and structural violence, nature gained a new, vital role in the everyday lives of Kosovo Albanians.
With no reliable income or access to a functioning state, many turned to the land, and domestic animals as essential sources of survival. More than subsistence, these elements became foundations for social, spiritual, and cultural resilience. This research explores how nature, both as a material environment and symbolic space, shaped personal and collective survival narratives. Acts like gardening, farming, and raising livestock were not only driven by necessity, but also served as forms of resistance and memory.
Based on oral histories and lived experiences from the 1990s, this presentation examines how people used nature to reclaim a sense of dignity and belonging amid crisis. The shift from urban employment to rural subsistence work is reflected in language and storytelling, revealing a transformed relationship with place, one not mediated by the state, but rooted in everyday life. Ultimately, the narrative of nature in 1990s Kosovo challenges classic boundaries between urban and rural, proposing an alternative model of coexistence and resistance in times of socio-political crisis.
Paper short abstract
The landscapes of Latvia, reshaped by the Second World War and Soviet rule, gave rise to environmentalism as an eco-social agency. Nature became a symbol of belonging and resistance, meaning that caring for the environment became inextricably linked with caring for home and nation.
Paper long abstract
The Second World War and subsequent Soviet military, economic, and industrial policies profoundly reshaped Latvia’s economic, demographic, and social structures. These shifts also transformed the environment and landscape in both rural and urban areas. Today, the legacy of war and the Soviet regime persists in impersonal, standardized urban landscapes; abandoned rural areas; and degraded, militarily contaminated sites. These upheavals altered the physical landscape and reshaped people’s emotional bonds to their surroundings, raising questions of place identity, eco-social agency, and eco-national processes. As Katrīna Schwartz has argued, environmental threats were often reframed as threats to the nation itself.
Latvia’s experience shows that environmental engagement cannot be understood without reference to place, memory, and identity. Whether in national protests against hydroelectric dams or neighbourhood-based activism, environmentalism functioned as a deeply embedded form of eco-social agency. These actions responded not only to ecological harm but also to threats against cultural continuity, lived landscapes, and community autonomy. Eco-nationalism thus evolved as both a reaction to and an expression of identity, where nature became a symbol of belonging, loss, and resistance. Analysed case studies demonstrate how caring for the environment is inseparable from caring for one’s home and nation. These struggles reveal a convergence of political, ecological, and emotional geographies. Environmentalism becomes a medium through which people assert their right to place, reclaim agency, and narrate continuity in the face of imposed change, protecting nature as a resource, national symbol, and socially embedded space.
Paper short abstract
This paper explores how selected Ukrainian Eurovision entries use folklore and nature as symbols of resilience and identity, blending ritual motifs with pop spectacle and reshaping cultural storytelling on the Eurovision stage.
Paper long abstract
This paper explores how Ukrainian entries in the Eurovision Song Contest have mobilized folkloric and nature-based narratives as tools of national self-presentation, cultural continuity, and symbolic resistance—particularly in the context of Russian aggression. Focusing on performances such as Ruslana’s Wild Dances (2004), Go_A’s Shum (2021), and Kalush Orchestra’s Stefania (2022), the study reveals how these acts blend archaic ritual elements, traditional costumes, and soundscapes rooted in Ukrainian folk culture with the visual grammar of contemporary spectacle. These performances do not merely aestheticize folklore; they transform it into a dynamic form of narrative action, where forests, fields, ancestral voices, and hybrid creatures become signifiers of endurance, transformation, and connection to the land.
Special attention will be given to how these narratives respond to war-time trauma and reclaim cultural sovereignty through a performative commons, blending the natural and supernatural, the rural and digital. The paper also considers the ripple effect of these Ukrainian performances: how they have influenced other countries' ethno-traditional entries and reshaped the aesthetics of nature and folklore on the Eurovision stage. In doing so, it probes how folklore—when rendered through mass performance—functions as a site of political resilience, collective memory, and ecological imagination in the global arena.
Paper short abstract
A comparative study of Ukrainian and Lithuanian interwar and partisan songs reveals how the onset of war is voiced through young soldiers’ readiness for fighting and their farewells to loved ones. Both are framed by natural and landscape motifs that reflect parallel folkloric traditions.
Paper long abstract
Conducting my thesis research “The Concept of War in Lithuanian and Ukrainian Military Songs (19th–21st Centuries),” I analyse and compare the “war” concept in Ukrainian and Lithuanian folk military songs. The historical and cultural parallels of both nations’ struggles for liberation against Russian rule provide strong grounds for examining folk songs and folklorized authorial works performed during these conflicts.
The research focuses on the semantic analysis of the “war” concept during periods when these communities defended their national identity and statehood while sharing similar experiences of resistance. In particular, attention is paid to the interwar period of the early twentieth century: the era of the Ukrainian Sich Riflemen (1914–1918) and the Lithuanian Wars of Independence (1918–1920). The analysis also includes partisan songs of the post-war period, represented by the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (1942–1960) and the Lithuanian Partisan War (1944–1953).
To capture the existential crisis expressed through folklore, I emphasize a chronological structure of war in three stages: the onset, the course of war, and its conclusion. The first stage primarily reveals the attitude and readiness of young people to become soldiers, as well as their emotional experiences of parting with their families.
The semantic core of the transition from peaceful life to wartime encompasses motifs of readiness for a militant future and farewell to a past existence. This transformation is symbolized in both traditions by lexemes of nature, including natural phenomena, animal, and plant imagery. Furthermore, the landscape itself acquires symbolic meaning, rationalizing the necessity of struggle.
Paper short abstract
In an autoethnography, I explore the memories of key landscapes in my life in Ukraine to understand the presence of the Eerie in my experience of displacement. Through a narrative of a protagonist in a folk tale, I counter the Eerie and engage with my home landscapes beyond distance and destruction.
Paper long abstract
In a posthumanist autoethnography, I explore the memories of key landscapes in my life in Ukraine to understand the presence of the Eerie in my experience of displacement due to the escalation of Russian aggression in 2022. In Ukrainian, the word for the Eerie, Motoroshnist’, comes from the verb mutyty, meaning to stir, or disturb—a word connected to zamut (chaos, confusion), mutyshche (mud, sediment), and mutlavytsya (murky water). The Eerie is something hidden, not meant to be stirred. Yet, in my project, I deliberately disturb it and trace the elements that comprise the Eerie to see how it reveals the complexity of the displaced individual’s experience and my relationship to home landscapes. I outline the key components of the Eerie: ambivalent feelings toward my family, postcolonial haunting, landscape loss due to war, internalized colonialism, and voicelessness. Through a narrative of a folk tale protagonist who faces a chimera, I describe ways to counter each element and engage with my home landscapes beyond distance and destruction: through a persisting emotional bond to the landscapes as kin, growing love for the new places, by imagining my way into the landscape’s way of being, sharing stories about landscapes, and grounding in my body. Broadly, this study argues that overcoming the entanglements of present and inherited traumas is possible by finding kinship in landscapes.
Paper short abstract
An estimated one-third of Ukrainian territory has become contaminated since Russia’s full-scale invasion. This paper examines how Ukrainian soil is discursively constructed across textual and visual media narratives and analyzes how they shape our understanding of the war’s environmental violence.
Paper long abstract
Narratives about Ukrainian soil have circulated widely in mainstream and social media throughout Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Media narratives invoke “General Mud” and rasputitsa (the muddy season) to explain the timing of various offensives and counter-offensives. Satellite and drone imagery offers a visual chronicle from above of the transformation of the land under intensive bombing as well as the construction of trenches and fortifications. With an estimated one-third of Ukrainian territory now contaminated, the fate of soil is central to the country’s food system and future social and economic reconstruction. Chornozem, or black soil, is also entwined with agrarian identities in Ukraine. This paper explores how Ukrainian soil at war is discursively constructed across textual and visual narratives that alternately frame it as an agent shaping the conflict, an environmental and agricultural disaster, a resource to be exploited, or a mere backdrop to more important developments. Drawing on elemental media studies, Ukrainian environmental humanities, and interdisciplinary approaches to soil studies, I argue that these narratives shape our understanding of the war’s environmental costs by drawing attention to some forms of soil damage at the same time as they circumscribe more complex engagements with soil’s human and more-than-human relations. Despite often appearing in the background, the destruction and remediation of soil are central stories of the war and shape both extractivist and restorative imaginaries of Ukraine’s post-conflict future.
Paper short abstract
The paper examines how images and narratives of nature are constructed in the digital folklore of the Russo-Ukrainian War, as well as the traits attributed to them. The paper also traces how such motifs have migrated across different narrative cycles
Paper long abstract
Folklore is a means through which people think and learn, transmit knowledge and traditions, shape collective identity, and make sense of the world within a specific community.
In the context of the Russo-Ukrainian war, folklore has primarily developed through digital tools, most notably on social media platforms.
Among these, memes have emerged as the most pervasive form of digital folklore. The sheer volume and speed of meme production since the onset of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine are unprecedented, with new memes being created and circulated daily.
The paper examines how images of nature are constructed in memes and the traits attributed to them. As the war has unfolded, the portrayal of nature has evolved, with various motifs crystallizing around it. The paper aims to trace how such motifs have migrated across different narrative cycles and to analyze the representation of nature that memes have produced in the public imagination.