Join us for the 2024 Kalbouss Innovative Approaches Lecture featuring Dr. Victoria Donovan! See Dr. Donovan's Abstract below for more information on her lecture, "De-Occupying the Archive: Art as Liberatory Practice."
Dr. Donovan currently works as the Director of Impact and Professor of Ukrainian and east European Studies at St. Andrews in the United Kingdom. Her research focuses on the heritage of the Ukrainian East, community identities, and cultural memory politics.
You can find out more about Dr. Donovan's research and publications here, including her collaborative projects “De-industrialisation and Conflict in Donbas: Capacity building in Ukraine to make Donbas (mono)towns inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable,” (Global Challenges Research Fund, 2018-19) “Un/archiving Post/industry: Engaging Heritage and Developing Cultural Infrastructures,” (Global Challenges Research Fund and House of Europe, 2019-20), and “Donbas in Focus: Visions of Industry from the Ukrainian East.
De-occupying the archive: Art as liberatory practice
"If as Achille Mbembe reminds us archives are infrastructures of colonial epistemic violence, Soviet industrial archives in Ukraine deal in specialist kinds of epistemic imperialism. Doubling as the dominant institutions of memory in many Ukrainian ‘monotowns,’ industrial archives, and the celebratory words and images of extractivist practice they contain, manifest as the institutionalised and thus ‘authoritative’ meaning of these places. This epistemic reduction can be understood as what Asiya Bazdyrieva calls the ‘resourcification’ of Ukraine, its reduction in the economic and cultural imaginaries to a set of resources to be plundered and exchanged for profit. This ‘resourcifying’ logic continues to power Russia’s war against Ukraine, in which the country, including the heavily industrialised East, is diminished to a non-agential commodity to be controlled and exchanged. The looting and destruction of archives, libraries, and museums is part of Russia’s continuing campaign to control Ukraine’s epistemic infrastructures, asserting hegemony over the meaning of its cultural space. This paper looks at the ways in which artists from Ukraine have resisted (re-)colonial epistemic violence, through engaging industrial archives, confronting and dismantling their infrastructures of epistemic occupation. De-occupying archives through critical reworkings of archival photography and video, Oleksandr Kuchynskyi, Anna Pylypyuk & Volodymyr Shypotilnikov, Kateryna Syrik, Elias Parvulesko and Sashko Protyah, among others, raise questions about archival knowledge, epistemic violence and the liberatory potential of contemporary art practice. Considering my own work with the Center of Urban History on the ‘City in a Suitcase’ project, I ask how archives of the occupied and destroyed territories, including heavily industrialized spaces such as Mariupol, Sieverodonetsk, and Soledar, can be reconstituted through community-led practice, resisting the recreation of ‘resourcifying’ archival politics and instead setting free alternative world perceptions (Tlostanova, 2019)."
The Kalbouss Innovative Approaches to Slavic Cultural Studies Lecture was established in the spring of 2019 through the generosity of Associate Professor Emeritus George Kalbouss. Dr. Kalbouss taught in the Department of Slavic and East European Languages and Literatures (now Department of Slavic and East European Languages and Cultures [SEELC]) from 1973 to 2001 and his contributions are far too many to enumerate here. An outstanding educator with a commitment to supporting Slavic studies in the state of Ohio, in 1967 Dr. Kalbouss created an Introduction to Russian Culture course which was the first of its kind. Having written and published the Russian culture textbook, he taught over 15,000 students through this course during his academic career at Ohio State University. Before his time at SEELC, Dr. Kalbouss had been an assistant professor of Russian at Dartmouth College from 1967-73, and an Instructor of Russian at Purdue University from 1966-67. Dr. Kalbouss received his Ph.D. in Slavic Languages from New York University in 1968, and his M.A. and B.A. degrees from Columbia University. Beginning in 1961, Dr. Kalbouss served in the United States Army Reserves’ Military Intelligence branch, retiring as Lieutenant Colonel in 1999.
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