Life in Spite of Everything: Tales from the Ukrainian East

CBEES Advanced Seminar with Victoria Donovan, Professor of Ukrainian and East European Studies and the Director of the Centre for Global (Post)socialisms at the University of St Andrews.

Speaker: Victoria Donovan, Professor of Ukrainian and East European Studies and the Director of the Centre for Global (Post)socialisms at the University of St Andrews.

Discussant: Anna Balazs, Postdoctoral Researcher at CBEES, Södertörn University.

Chair: Julia Malitska, Project Researcher at the School of Historical and Contemporary Studies and Research Coordinator at CBEES, Södertörn University.

Abstract: Since the start of Russia’s war against Ukraine in 2014, its eastern region – Donbas – has been synonymous with conflict. With the escalation of that war in 2022, its cities such as Bakhmut and Lysychansk have become familiar to us through the images and reports of brutal devastation. Victoria Donovan excavates a rich, multicultural history of this area, and paints a radically different picture.

Travelling from the dramatic, jagged peaks of Biloku’mynivka to the marshland of Mariupol, from a warehouse rave to an abandoned gypsum mine, the physical world and its importance to this region’s identity is brought to vivid life. But above all else, by speaking to those whose lives are embedded there now – curators, artists, railway workers, young people who have grown up amidst instability and destruction – Donovan amplifies local voices and reveals the intensely personal lived reality of Putin’s war.

Revelatory, evocative and deeply humane, Life In Spite of Everything is a celebration of a country’s past and present, and its people’s tenacity, creativity and independence.

Victoria Donovan is a Professor of Ukrainian and East European Studies and the Director of the Centre for Global (Post)socialisms at the University of St Andrews. She works at the intersection of heritage studies, urban history, visual anthropology, and the public humanities. Her current research, exploring entangled colonialisms and industrial extraction with a focus on the Ukrainian East, has resulted in a wide variety of outputs, from academic and non-fiction writing, exhibitions, archives, community workshops, to artistic practice. Donovan’s work has received numerous prizes, including a British Academy Rising Star Engagement Award, an AHRC/BBC New Generation Thinker Award, and in 2023, in partnership with the Centre for Urban History in Lviv a European Heritage/EuropaNostra Award for Citizens’ Engagement and Awareness Raising. She is the author of Chronicles in Stone: Preservation, Patriotism, and Identity in Northwest Russia, published with NIUP imprint at Cornell in 2019; Limits of Collaboration: Art, Ethics, and Donbas, with Darya Tsymbalyuk and others, published by Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung in 2022. Her new book Life in Spite of Everything: Tales from the Ukrainian East is forthcoming with Daunt Books Publishing in 2025.