(Re)Imagining Donbas: Discourses, Representations, and Memory of a Contested Region

Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description

Two ongoing wars that have ravaged in Ukraine’s eastern regions over the past decade have prompted a renewed engagement with the Donetsk Basin, or Donbas, and its regional identity. Historically understood as an industrialized, coal-producing region essential to Ukraine’s major exports of steel and other heavy metals, the region has also been (mis)understood as a bastion of pro-Russian sentiments and a challenge to Ukrainian political unity since 1991. Drawing on foundational research by Kuromiya, as well new contributions from Ukraine by authors such as Zarembo, this session takes a multidisciplinary approach to a reimagining of the region known as Donbas. Panelists will bring together economic, historical, and anthropological perspectives to explore how Donbas has previously been imagined, represented, and remembered, and will ask how war and violence have shaped the region in long- and short-term historical perspectives. The panel will address such questions as what “Donbas” means for historical and contemporary academic study, as well as for Ukraine’s national identity; how this region has been neglected and even sometimes actively excluded from the study of Ukraine; and how a multidisciplinary approach can elucidate new questions and new ways of seeing Donbas.

Sub Unit

• Anthropology, Cultural Studies

Chair

• Olena Nikolayenko, Fordham U

Papers

• 'Every Individual Was Worth Their Weight in Gold': Euromaidan and Political Engagement in Donetsk - Emily S. Channell-Justice, Harvard U

• Donbas as a Region of Economic Imagination - Max Trecker, U of Pittsburgh

• Can a Place be Erased?: Affective Remaking of Home in Displaced Communities - Alisa Sopova, Princeton U

Discussant

• Sergiy Kudelia, Baylor U