Infrastructures of Liberation II: Resistance, Reconstruction, and De-Occupation in the Ukrainian Commons

Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description

Infrastructures of Liberation II: residues and ambivalences

Since the invasions of 2014/2022, the built environments, infrastructures, ecosystems and socio-cultural fabrics of Ukraine have been systematically laid to waste by russia’s (re)colonial war machine. Building on a long historical record of appropriating, subjugating and disfiguring the lands of others, the russian state has to attempted to entrench its re-occupation of Ukraine through multiple infrastructures: martial, architectural, technological, ecological, aesthetic, socio-cultural, demographic, eugenic, legal, fiscal, cadastral.

The focus of this panel is not on subjugation and annexation, but on de-occupation and liberation. It catalogues and compares some ways in which infrastructures of russian (re)coloniality have already been resisted, dismantled and unsettled in Ukraine’s de-occupied and liberated territories. Further, it contemplates infrastructural strategies towards the longue-duree reconstruction (and de-colonisation) of Ukraine. What can we learn from Ukraine’s layered, lived experience of self- and collective organisation in the realms of humanitarian work, defence, re-adaptation and reconstruction? How does collective organisation manifest itself on a voluntaristic “bottom-up” level, as well as through the “vertical” structures of the state and military? How can wartime infrastructures of liberation animate the endurance and reconstitution of the Ukrainian postwar commons?

*Note: russia is written with a small “r” above to signal an activist stance towards the illegitimacy of the present-day russian federation as a political entity; and to mark the commitment of participants to the dismantlement of its infrastructures of violence and subjugation.

This panel belongs to a double series: "Infrastructures of Occupation" and "Infrastructures of Liberation"

Sub Unit

• Arts I: Visual Culture, Material Culture, Applied and Fine Arts

Chair

• Samuel Veremchuk, U of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Papers

• Ambicoloniality and the Decolonization of Ukrainian Culture - Svitlana Biedarieva, Independent Scholar

• The Many Returns; To Over-exist - Darya Tsymbalyuk, U of Chicago

• De-Occupying the Archive: Art as Liberatory Practice - Victoria Donovan, U of St Andrews (UK)

Discussant

• Samuel Veremchuk, U of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign