Paper short abstract:

This project is aimed at demonstrating the formation of the colonial practices of the USSR in pumping resources from the periphery. Case - a collection of waste - rags, and bones for recycling in Ukraine 1920-1930s.

Paper long abstract:

In the early Soviet Union, the collection of various waste materials was of strategic importance, as significant resources were required to rebuild the Soviet economy and carry out industrialization. As early as the 1920s, the USSR began large-scale programs to collect waste, particularly rags and bones. These wastes proved to be crucial resources for the development of a number of industries, including paper, chemicals, construction, luxury goods, cooking, fertilizers, and others. The scarcity of these wastes due to the lack of materials, underdeveloped economy, poverty of the population, collectivization, and Holodomor, as well as the impossibility of meeting normative targets, led to the emergence of colonial practices of their removal from the population, including the inhabitants of peripheral regions. These practices will be examined by taking the example of Ukraine in the period from the 1920s to the early 1930s.

The report will disprove the popular idea that recycling began to develop in the USSR and its republics, particularly Ukraine, only during the Cold War and demonstrate the perspective field of development of Ukrainian environmental history, demonstrating the national context of waste recycling activity.

This paper will be constructed on the basis of archival materials from Ukrainian archives that have not been previously introduced into scholarly circulation. This contribution will contribute to the decolonization of sources used by Western academia and thus help to bring Ukrainian environmental history from the periphery.

Paper short abstract:

The key aspects are the definition of an industrial landscape as a heritage object, environmental issues within the frame of a decolonisation and practices of work with this heritage in the condition of the ongoing war.

Paper long abstract:

The territories of Donbass played an important role in the forming of Ukrainian identity, beginning from the times of Wild Fields and ending to the war of 2014 and full-scale invasion of Russian Federation. In my report, I would like to use the definition of landscape as an umbrella term for using the interdisciplinary connection of environmental history, heritage studies, memory studies and postcolonial discourse. First, I will study the image of Donbass landscapes in the Soviet propaganda and the spread of power through the management of natural resources. Another issue is the perception of environmental problems caused by Soviet politics in contemporary context, which could be considered within the decolonization framework. The next step is studying the transition from the industrial landscape to the war-torn one in social media and artistic works. The third section will be devoted to discussions among experts regarding practical work with such landscapes in the future. The main focus of these discussions revolves around their representation within the context of dark tourism and how the events of the ongoing war should be represented in memory landscape. How are the themes of war and the environment intertwined? Which narratives are predominant?

Paper short abstract:

In this paper using the case of studying Dnipro wetlands and Kakhovka Reservoir I argue that oral history as an environmental methodology is able to shed light on human-environmental interactions from a new angle and thus challenge the legacy of colonialism in the study of Ukraine and environment.

Paper long abstract:

In 2023 the world was shaken by the news of the disruption of the Kakhovka HPP. It was called the largest environmental war crime since Russia's 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine. This event found a wide response in Ukrainian society and revived the discussions about the necessity of construction of the Kakhovka Reservoir in the 1950s, which flooded a historically, economically and culturally important landscape - the Dnipro wetlands. Studying the history of the Dnipro wetlands it turned out that oral histories are one of the most important sources for researching this case. The stories of local residents about wetlands and newly constructed reservoir made it possible to look at this story not as a history of the construction of a Soviet industrial giant, but as a story about land, water and nature and the relationship of human with the environment. Documentary sources of the Soviet period give us mostly the history of progress, oral sources instead - the human dimension, another lens through which we can see not only achievements in the name of progress. In this paper I argue that oral history can be and should be used in environmental history studies. Oral history should not be considered as an auxiliary methodology, aimed to fill the gaps that documentary sources have, but also as the main one. Oral history is able to shed light on human-environmental interactions from a new angle and thus challenge the legacy of colonialism in the study of Ukraine and environment.

Paper short abstract:

This paper analyzes Ukrainian wartime tractor memes as a popular interpretive lens for critiquing Russian colonialism past and present. Rereading these memes through Ukrainian historical and environmental contexts, I argue that they gesture to an agro-futurist politics of repair.

Paper long abstract:

Shortly after Russia invaded Ukraine in February, 2022, a viral video showed a tractor pulling a tank through empty fields, chased by a man attempting to recover his vehicle. “Ukrainian farmer steals Russian tank from right under the nose of the Russians who occupied it,” the YouTube subtitle read. As similar videos proliferated, their popularity gave rise to a fast-growing gallery of social media memes playfully promoting “Ukraine’s Farmed Forces,” and later, an official tractor postage stamp. This paper argues that Ukrainian tractor memes remix visual and textual elements of everyday life during war, offering an interpretive lens for unfolding events that contextualizes the current conflict in two important ways. As a visual storytelling medium, these memes register civilian resistance against Russian occupation—which has deliberately targeted food system infrastructure—by reappropriating and inverting a long history of Russian cultural repertoires that have othered Ukrainians as backward peasants and restive rural Nationalists, and subjected them to expropriation of agricultural resources and mass forced famine. The battle-adjacent tractor is also emblematic of the environmental devastation of the war: the rapid circulation of internet memes contrasts with the slow violence of what is increasingly identified as ecocide in Ukraine, while gesturing to the future healing of soil and society through farming. This rereading of a seemingly flippant meme leads us to reconsider Russia’s war of aggression as, in part, an agricultural war with deep historical roots. It also offers grounds for reimagining an agro-futurist politics of environmental repair.

Paper short abstract:

The presentation brings together video elements and text to examine limits and possibilities of narrating (with) Ukrainian steppes. By experimenting with forms of articulation, it questions how can we tell stories of the steppes decolonially and with the inclusion of alternative modes of knowing.

Paper long abstract:

This paper combines elements of a video essay and text and focuses on the environmental impact of Russia’s war on Ukraine's steppes, as well as the longer threat to the steppe ecosystems posed by industrial agriculture. It is based on the author’s return home to the south of Ukraine and her fieldwork there in summer 2023. By bringing in artistic aspects the presentation questions the frames through which we study and engage with environments, their suitability for the inclusion of subaltern knowledge, as well as the inclusion of nonverbal, nonhuman articulations. In times when both language and ecosystems are shattered by the Russian colonial invasion, what is the relationship between anticolonial resistance and colonial environmental knowledge and practices that had shaped the region for centuries, as well as between the resistance and the Western colonial gaze directed at Ukraine as a case study of disaster and/or resilience? How does environmental justice look like when we imagine it from the steppes of Ukraine?

Paper short abstract:

On June 6, 2023, Russian troops blew up the Kakhovka Hydroelectric Power Plant dam. The damage done to the environment in the 1950s was justified by the benefit to society. As a result, it was a tragedy for people and the environment then, and its had a catastrophic consequences now

Paper long abstract:

On June 6, 2023, Russian troops blew up the dam of the Kakhovka hydroelectric power plant. A few days later, Nova Kakhovka and Kherson were partially flooded, and the Kakhovka reservoir ceased to exist. This tragedy has a geographical and temporal dimension. It unites the people who lost their homes during the construction of the Kakhovka hydroelectric power plant (1951) and the population of the central regions of Ukraine, who were relocated to the arid territories of the South because of the construction of the Dnipro hydro cascade (1954). Both categories of IDPs underwent a new traumatic experience during the hostilities resulting from the Russian invasion of 2022. For a long time, their losses were compensated for by the perception of the social benefit of their sacrifice. However, after the repeated destruction of their homes and the Kakhovka disaster, people who have already had previous traumatic experiences have to rebuild their lives and find new values and meanings. The main issue of the future is not only the liberation of the occupied territories, but also the restoration of life, so Ukrainian society is interested in the question of whether the Kakhovka reservoir will be restored. In addition to the conclusions of economists, geographers, and environmentalists, people's opinions are influenced by their traumatic experiences.

The methodological basis of the work is memory studies.

Paper short abstract:

Encounters between researchers, bees, beekeepers in Transcarpathia, Ukraine at different times between 1920 and 2023 are narrated in order to reflect on the challenges of doing environmental research about Ukraine that captures its distinctive histories and disrupts imperial & colonial relations.

Paper long abstract:

Research about honeybees in Ukraine’s Zakarpattia Oblast, together with the bees themselves and their researchers, have a complicated history of being enrolled in colonial, imperial, and postcolonial projects. While in the 1920s Czechoslovak researchers were likely the first to identify an autochthonous, alpine population of bees as potentially valuable for industrial beekeeping, it was in the 1960s that professors from Moscow’s Timiriazev Agricultural Academy, enchanted by bees’ gentleness, mobilized the funds and researchers to identify the bees as “Carpathian” and create the infrastructure to conserve and reproduce them for distribution across the Soviet Union. In 1989, Ukraine’s newly established Prokopovych Beekeeping Institute became the centre of researching Carpathian bees and incorporated Zakarpattia-based researchers. With ever-diminishing resources, researchers became commercial breeders and sold their queens in Ukraine and abroad (e.g. Moldova, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Russia, and most recently Canada) to sustain themselves and the institute’s research program. Recently, however, Ukrainian beekeepers’ enchantment with other kinds of bees from Austria and Germany, has complicated researchers’ conservation work and undermined their epistemic authority, a situation the pandemic and the Russian invasion of Ukraine exacerbated. Enter a (Ukrainian-) Canadian anthropologist who researches Ukrainian researchers researching Carpathian bees. This paper narrates encounters between researchers, bees, beekeepers, and landscapes at different times to reflect on some challenges of doing environmental research about Ukraine that simultaneously captures its distinctive histories while disrupting imperial and colonial relations that peripheralize or occlude them.

Paper short abstract:

This paper examines the challenges of studying, writing, and articulating the history of Ukraine’s famines and explores how to incorporate the post- and decolonial theory and environmental optics.

Paper long abstract:

During famines in history, the deterioration of the economic and environmental conditions in rural and urban areas had dramatic consequences on many levels of life, including social, human, and non-human. Ukraine’s Soviet famines of 1921–1923, 1932–1933, and 1946–1947 are usually considered through the lenses of national (Ukrainian) and area (Soviet) studies, political and economic history, and demography. However, to understand their causes and consequences, it is crucially important to include the research on Ukraine’s famines in discussions on decolonization in Ukrainian, Soviet, Slavic, and Eastern European studies more broadly. By analyzing these periods of extreme social and environmental ruptures from the decolonial and postcolonial theory perspectives, this paper aims to challenge the existing theoretical and epistemological traditions and to uncover the long-existing colonial frameworks and economic and food inequalities. Moreover, the research on famines should expand beyond studying its impact on people. Uncovering the implications of famines on the lives of humans, more-than-human species, and the environment, this paper will shed light on the challenges when writing and articulating about other contemporaries of famines, especially when the thinking and studying their histories coellipsed with Russia’s war against Ukraine and enormous challenges and threats of survival to people, animals, and environment. Looking at ways of enriching our understanding of famines as human, more-than-human, and national catastrophes, this paper invites scholars and the wider community to think of famine from ethically inclusive and postcolonial perspectives, making a place for grieving all who became their victims.

Paper short abstract:

The paper studies narratives in which non-human actors (animals), are used for shaping the representations of human/more-than-human bonds in the context of the Russo-Ukrainian war. Through these narratives we see the extension of epistemic frames that counter imperialism and human exceptionalism.

Paper long abstract:

Drawing on the concept of “humanitarian narrative” as elaborated by Thomas Laqueur (1989), the paper proposes to approach symbols and narratives of non-human animals as realization of the post-humanitarian narrative, which broadens the boundaries of the “living landscape” in which not only human life, but also non-human animals’ and even not animals’ (land- and waterscapes) existences are included. For Laqueur, the humanitarian narrative developed since the scientific revolution of the 17th century and produced a specific kind of reaction to the suffering of the others (“common people” and the poor) - the reactions based on compassion and sympathy. I argue that the post-humanitarian narrative extends the boundaries between human and hon-human and produces not only compassion and sympathy, but also a distinct incentive for care that puts action in the continuum from past, present, into the future. Indeed, the future becomes a central driving force for the workings of this narrative. The post-humanitarian narrative extends the understanding of whose lives are “grievable” (Butler 2009) and worth mourning/saving.

The post-humanitarian narrative is a child of the the 21st century reflecting and encompassing all kinds of “posts” – postmodernism, postsecularism, postcolonialism. It is the product of the Anthropocene that bears a critical awareness of global warming, nuclear threats, and possible catastrophic destruction. Moreover, through this narrative we can see a critical reflection on the work of international humanitarian organizations that lack a deeper understanding of local contexts. In this way, post-humanitarian narrative works withing the decolonial framework producing new epistemologies of war.