Positioning Ukraine within Interdisciplinary Decolonization Research

Workshop at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies on November 28–29, 2024.

Time: 28–29 November 2024
Venue: Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies, Common Room, Fabianinkatu 24 A Helsinki (3rd floor)
Organizer: Lina Klymenko (HCAS)

Since the spring of 2022, Ukraine’s resistance to the Russian invasion has triggered a wide scholarly debate on the decolonization of Ukrainian Studies. This prompted scholars of various disciplines to rethink the study of Ukraine within the broader decolonization research paradigm, to engage with new research methodologies and methods, and to confront existing institutional academic structures. While the international scholarly community has meanwhile acknowledged a general lack of adequate knowledge about Ukraine, there are still many important questions to be asked: What is the system of knowledge production and dissemination about Ukraine in current international academia? How is the decolonization of the study of Ukraine embedded in the broader decolonization process taking place in a number of interdisciplinary Area Studies? And, eventually, how do we move the study of Ukraine from the margin to the core of various disciplines? This workshop invites the participants to discuss the study of Ukraine in the context of comparative and interdisciplinary research on decolonization across the various regions that arose after the collapse of the Soviet empire.

Registration

Please register for the event by completing the form below by November 20:

Registration for Positioning Ukraine within Interdisciplinary Decolonization Research.

Program

28 November

Welcome coffee

9:30–9:40
Introduction
Hanne Appelqvist, Director, Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies
Lina Klymenko, Core Fellow, Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies

9:40–12:00
Session 1: Decolonizing Regions 
Chair: Lina Klymenko, Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies

Refusing Inter-imperiality towards Europe’s East for Anti-oppressive Research
Tereza Hendl, University of Augsburg

Processing the traumatic past: Baltic debates about Soviet occupation and coloniality 
Una Bergmane, University of Helsinki

Post-colonial theory and the Yugozone
Brendan Humphreys, University of Helsinki

Studying the Role of Central Asia in Global Knowledge Production with a Decolonial Approach
Sirke Mäkinen, University of Helsinki

12:00–13:00 Lunch

13:00–14:50
Session 2: Decolonizing Theories
Chair: Jitka Štollová, Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies

“To decolonize or not to decolonize?”
Natalya Bekhta, Tampere University

Reassessing EU Policies on Ukraine: A Decolonial Perspective
Tyyne Karjalainen, Finnish Institute of International Affairs

Decolonization of Russian Security Studies
Katri Pynnöniemi, University of Helsinki

14:50–15:00 Coffee  

15:00–16:50
Session 3: Decolonizing Methodologies
Chair: Frog, Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies

Chernobyl, Chornobyl and the Literary Dimensions of Ukrainizing the Nuclear
Inna Häkkinen, University of Helsinki

When one door closes, another two open – The Impact of Russia’s War of Aggression on Historical Research
Pia Koivunen, Turku University

Knowledge-making in a shattered world: drawing, writing, researching
Darya Tsymbalyuk, University of Chicago (online)

29 November 

Welcome coffee 

10:00–12:00
Roundtable: Thinking about Area Studies Beyond Post-Soviet Contexts

Julie Yu-Wen Chen, University of Helsinki

Tereza Hendl, University of Augsburg  

Friederike Lüpke, University of Helsinki 

Eeva Sippola, University of Helsinki

Sanna Turoma, Tampere University

12:00 Lunch

Abstracts and short biographies

Tereza Hendl: Refusing Inter-imperiality towards Europe’s East for Anti-oppressive Research

Debates in/on Europe have long been conducted as if its Eastern part was no site of knowledge production worth familiarising with. A hierarchical East-West divide persists, centering the West as a source of ‘objective’ and reliable knowledge, rendering the East as subaltern. The epistemic marginalisation of East European scholarship has majorly narrowed the scale of knowledge, resulting in epistemic gaps and distortions of socio-historical and lived realities, shaped in particular by brutal legacies by German and Russian imperialism and genocidal colonialism in Europe’s East. Recent responses to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine have further uncovered a power dynamic of inter-imperiality across many disciplines, that have theorised (post)occupied Europe’s East under Western eyes and in relation to Russia. Meanwhile, on a global scale, critical debates on imperialism have focused on the de-centering of Europe while losing out of sight and concern the inter-imperiality that its peripheralized East has resisted. The paper aims to respond to the epistemic and material inter-imperiality towards Europe’s East by envisioning a theory and politics of refusal. So far, rich debates on refusal have emerged as a core counter-strategy to Western colonialism and extractivism in North American Indigenous scholarship (Tuck and Yang 2014). Building on de/anti-colonial, antiracist and feminist scholarship from Europe’s East, I will explore what a uniquely local theory and politics of refusal might entail in the context of (de)occupied Europe’s East and how it could be connected with debates from global South(s) perspectives. 

Tereza Hendl is a philosopher and bioethicist. After receiving her foundational education at the Charles University in Prague (Czech Republic), she has completed a PhD in Philosophy at Macquarie University (Australia). She currently works as a Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Augsburg and Research Associate at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. Her research investigates concerns of vulnerability, refusal, empowerment, justice and solidarity, and the ethics and epistemology of health technologies and interventions. Some of her latest work explores European East-West inequalities and their impact on health, also accounting for the impact of German and Russian imperialism. Dr Hendl was awarded the 2024 Best Paper Prize by the American Association of Ukrainian Studies for the paper “(En)Countering Epistemic Imperialism: A critique of ‘Westsplaining’ and coloniality in dominant debates on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine” and the 2015 Max Charlesworth Prize in Bioethics by the Australasian Association of Bioethics and Health Law. She is the founder of the Central and Eastern European Feminist Research Network, which supports CEE researchers and counters the epistemic marginalisation of CEE scholarship, and co-founder of the RUTA Association for Central, South, and Eastern Europe, Baltic, Caucasus, Central and Northern Asia Studies in Global Conversation.

Una Bergmane: Processing the traumatic past: Baltic debates about Soviet occupation and coloniality 

After the collapse of the Soviet Union and the restoration of Estonian, Latvian and Lithuanian independence, Baltic governments, scholars and societies engaged in attempts to process, conceptualise and commemorate the traumatic past shaped by both Nazi and Soviet rules over the Baltic countries. While the Nazi rule (1941-1944) has always been analysed as a foreign occupation, the Soviet period (1940-1941; 1945-1991) has been discussed as both a foreign occupation and a colonial experience. While the Baltic governments and most historians have primarily focused on the occupation and totalitarian/authoritarian framework, scholars such as Epp Annus, Benedikts Kalnačs and others studied the Baltic experience under Soviet rule through the lens of colonial theory. This presentation offers an overview of these debates while questioning the application of the settler colonial framework to Estonian and Latvian cases.

Una Bergmane is a Research Council of Finland fellow at the Aleksanteri Institute, University of Helsinki. She is the author of "Politics of Uncertainty: The United States, the Baltic Question, and the Collapse of the Soviet Union" (OUP, 2023). Before joining Helsinki University, Una was a postdoctoral fellow at Cornell University and a teaching fellow at the London School of Economics. She holds a PhD from the Sciences Po Paris. Her research has appeared in journals like The International History Review and Journal of Cold War Studies

Brendan Humphreys: Post-colonial theory and the Yugozone

In a recent op ed on Balkans stereotypes in American cinema, the Slovenian writer Ana Schnabl noted that certain groups were targeted ‘because to Hollywood they’re non-white or not-white-enough. What is considered not-white-enough has to do with either the history of colonialism or the history of communist regimes; sometimes, as is the case with Albanians and Croatians, their history meets both conditions.’

In her study Race and the Yugoslav Region (2018) Catherine Baker argues that the ‘Yugozone’ is ‘both post-conflict and postsocialist, it is also – following Chari and Vedery (2009) – postcolonial.’ She continues, speaking of ‘the well-meaning reluctance to import Western analytical frameworks into the supposedly separate historical context of (post)socialism. Race is subsumed into ethnicity and nationhood – but it need not be.’

This paper assesses the applicability of ‘Western analytical frameworks’ when applied to a region with its own history of violent exclusion and explicit racism, as noted by Bartulin and other scholars of the region. 

Brendan Humphreys is a Docent of East European studies. He is a historian and anthropologist who has published on many aspects of East European – especially Balkan – history, politics, and culture. His recent publications include ‘Adieu neutrality: The dwindling power of Nordic non-alignment’ (The Nordic Review of International Studies, 2024), and ‘The Past as a Foreign Language: history, loss and linguistic choice among Balkans writers’ (Mémoires de la Société Néophilologique de Helsinki, 2022).  

Sirke Mäkinen: Studying the Role of Central Asia in Global Knowledge Production with a Decolonial Approach

Sirke Mäkinen (Dr. Soc.Sc.) is a researcher and university lecturer at the Aleksanteri Institute, University of Helsinki. In addition, she holds the title of docent in Political Science, especially in International Politics. Her current research interests comprise international education, global knowledge production, international academic cooperation, foreign policy, geopolitics, and Central Asia. She has published in journals such as Comparative Education, Geopolitics, European Journal of Higher Education, International Studies Perspectives, Europe-Asia Studies, Journal of Contemporary European Studies, Nationalities Papers and Problems of Post-Communism. She is also the co-editor of the book Russia’s Cultural Statecraft (2022) together with Tuomas Forsberg and the guest editor of a Special Issue “Internationalisation in Challenging Times: Practices and rationales of internal and external stakeholders” (European Journal of Higher Education 2/2023).

Natalya Bekhta: “To decolonize or not to decolonize?”

This contribution will examine strategic uses of decolonial discourse in Ukraine-related contexts, highlighting gains and challenges that such uses may currently have as well as their potential to transcend the limitations of what philosopher Divya Dwivedi in the context of India described as the “de-post-colonial” framework.

Natalya Bekhta is Academy Research Fellow at Tampere University (Finland), where she is heading a research project on “Utopia and Eastern European Literature after 1989.” Her recent work focuses on contemporary Ukrainian fiction and develops a world-literary theory of the “second-world” literary region.

Tyyne Karjalainen: Reassessing EU Policies on Ukraine: A Decolonial Perspective

Debates on European security have long sidelined perspectives from the “periphery,” while the interests of Eurasian centers of power have dominated both academic thought and foreign policies on Eastern Europe. Ukrainian perspectives have been marginalized, as Moscow’s influence on European debates has led to a tacit acceptance of Russian imperialism within its self-described sphere of interest. This asymmetry in knowledge production has influenced EU policies on Ukraine. Since the pre-war European security order was based on agreements between power centers, Ukraine’s aspirations to integrate into the EU and NATO were denied, not only due to a lack of reforms in Ukraine but also because of considerations of Russia’s perceived interests in Eastern Europe. The full-scale war prompted new EU policies that align more closely with Ukraine’s right to self-determination, including military support and candidate status. While EU enlargement can support resistance to Russian imperialism, the accession process itself is not without echoes of asymmetric power use. Moreover, the risk of the EU legitimizing Russia’s imperialism remains as peace negotiations become more likely. This is evident in speeches by EU political leaders proposing models such as Finlandization for Ukraine to end the war. A decolonial perspective proposes that, in order to leave behind the European security order that enabled Russia’s aggression in the first place, the perspectives of the “peripheries” should be placed at the center of EU policies on Ukraine and at the forefront of imagining future peace and security in Europe.

Tyyne Karjalainen is a Researcher in the European Union research programme at the Finnish Institute of International Affairs. Her research focuses on European Union foreign and security policy, EU enlargement and differentiated integration in the EU. Her publications also cover peace-building, crisis management and peace mediation. Before joining FIIA, Karjalainen worked at the Civilian Security Sector Reform Component at the European Union Advisory Mission (EUAM) in Ukraine, the Research and Development Unit of the Crisis Management Centre (CMC) Finland, and the Finnish Permanent Representation to the United Nations in New York. Karjalainen is a doctoral researcher in political science at the University of Turku focusing on the EU’s Eastern neighbourhood policies. She holds a degree from the Master’s Programme in Peace, Mediation and Conflict Research at the University of Tampere.

Inna Häkkinen: Chernobyl, Chornobyl and the Literary Dimensions of Ukrainizing the Nuclear

Encompassing both the civilian and military aspects of nuclear energy, "ukrainizing the nuclear" (Wendland 2019) refers to both reclaiming control over nuclear resources and asserting national identity within the broader context of energy independence and security. Such focus on exploring nuclear narratives within the framework of decolonization offers a rich avenue for understanding Ukraine's current struggles and aspirations as well as encourages a holistic view that recognizes the interplay between historical injustices, contemporary geopolitical realities, and the quest for national identity. The literary response to the socio-cultural transformations, resulting from swift nuclear decolonization of Ukraine, resonates with existing narratives surrounding nuclear energy as well as contributes to producing new narratives that reflect the realities of war and the need for self-determination via a critical examination of how Ukraine’s nuclear energy has been represented historically and how it can be reimagined in a post-colonial context.

Dr. Inna Häkkinen (née - Sukhenko) is a visiting researcher of Helsinki Environmental Humanities Hub, the Department of Cultures, the University of Helsinki. Her current project is focused on researching the literary dimensions of nuclear energy within energy literary narrative frames. After defending her PhD in Literary Studies (Dnipro, Ukraine), she has been a research fellow of Erasmus Mundus mobility programs (Bologna, 2008; Turku, 2011-2012), Cambridge Colleges Hospitality Scheme (2013), Open Society Foundation (Warsaw, 2016-2017), JYU Visiting Fellowship Programme (Jyväskylä, 2021), PIASt Fellowship Program (Warsaw, 2022), iASK Program (Köszeg, 2023). She is among the contributors of ‘Energy in American History: A Political, Social and Environmental Encyclopedia’ (Bloomsbury Academic, 2024).Her general research interests lie within environmental humanities, energy humanities, petrocultures, ecocriticism, nuclear criticism, nuclear fiction, Chornobyl fiction, energy ethics. She coordinates and (co-)teaches ‘Chornobyl Studies’ course as well as ‘Nuclear Narratives in Eastern/Central Europe’ at the University of Helsinki (Aleksanteri Institute).

Pia Koivunen: When one door closes, another two open – The Impact of Russia’s War of Aggression on Historical Research

February 2022 marks a turning point in my research career. Until then, I had – over the past 15 years – frequently visited numerous archives and libraries in Russia to collect research materials. Along with vast economic sanctions, the EU recommended cutting all institutional ties with Russian and Belarussian state bodies, including universities, archives, libraries and museums. This means that researchers in the EU countries should not and could not visit those places anymore, at least not with public funding. In my presentation, I will discuss how this new situation changes historical research on Russia and the former Soviet Union now and in the future. Moreover, I will suggest new and alternative ways of finding sources as well as new angles to look at the research related to Russia and/or Soviet Union.

Pia Koivunen works as senior lecturer in European and World History at the University of Turku. She is specialized in Russian and Soviet history in the 19th and 20th centuries. Her recent publications include a monograph Performing Peace and Friendship. The World Youth Festival and Soviet Cultural Diplomacy (De Gruyter, 2022, open access) and A Historian, Her Childhood Experiences and the Power of Memory”. In (An)archive of Memories: Restor(y)ing Cold War Childhoods, Iveta Silova, Zsuzsa Millei & Nelli Piattoeva (eds). (The Open Book Publishers 2024, open access).

Darya Tsymbalyuk: Knowledge-making in a shattered world: drawing, writing, researching 

Working with contexts shattered by violence means dealing with erasures and gaps in archives, theory, and landscapes. It is also often the stories of those already marginalized that are absent from dominant narratives. These silences prompt us to turn to speculation, imagination and association in (re)telling different stories. In this short presentation I share examples from my critical-creative practice and discuss how engagement with different forms, such as drawing, (non)academic writing, video, etc, deeply shapes the kinds of knowledge I make in my work.

Roundtable

Julie Yu-Wen Chen (MA, Leiden University; PhD, University of Konstanz) is Professor of Chinese Studies at Department of Cultures at the University of Helsinki. She is one of the editors for the highly ranked Journal of Chinese Political Sciences, under the auspices of the Association of Chinese Political Studies dedicated to academic and professional activities relating to Chinese politics. Currently, she is working on a book that explores the politics of global knowledge production about China. 

Tereza Hendl is a philosopher and bioethicist. After receiving her foundational education at the Charles University in Prague (Czech Republic), she has completed a PhD in Philosophy at Macquarie University (Australia). She currently works as a Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Augsburg and Research Associate at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. Her research investigates concerns of vulnerability, refusal, empowerment, justice and solidarity, and the ethics and epistemology of health technologies and interventions. Some of her latest work explores European East-West inequalities and their impact on health, also accounting for the impact of German and Russian imperialism. Dr Hendl was awarded the 2024 Best Paper Prize by the American Association of Ukrainian Studies for the paper “(En)Countering Epistemic Imperialism: A critique of ‘Westsplaining’ and coloniality in dominant debates on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine” and the 2015 Max Charlesworth Prize in Bioethics by the Australasian Association of Bioethics and Health Law. She is the founder of the Central and Eastern European Feminist Research Network, which supports CEE researchers and counters the epistemic marginalisation of CEE scholarship, and co-founder of the RUTA Association for Central, South, and Eastern Europe, Baltic, Caucasus, Central and Northern Asia Studies in Global Conversation. 

Friederike Lüpke is professor of African studies and chair of AfriStadi, the Africa Research Forum for Social Sciences and Humanities, at the University of Helsinki. Her research on small-scale multilingualism in West Africa and worldwide centers the notion of conviviality, i.e. of living with and in difference. Beyond her disciplinary interests, epistemological questions are of great concern to her, in particular regarding the (post)colonial history of European African Studies. She is committed to mainstreaming African knowledge(s) as crucially contributing to theory formation and to the development of equitable research paradigms, extending the notion of conviviality to the co-existence and dialogue of disciplines and schools of thought.

Eeva Sippola is professor of Ibero-American languages and cultures at the University of Helsinki. She has previously held positions at the University of Bremen and Aarhus University. Her research interests have a broad focus on contact linguistics and critical sociolinguistics in the Hispanic world. Sippola has published on descriptive and comparative creolistics, postcolonial language studies and sociolinguistic issues, including language endangerment and ideologies. She is the co-editor-in-chief of the Journal of Postcolonial Linguistics and currently editing the Routledge Handbook of Postcolonial and Decolonial Linguistics together with Carsten Levisen.

Sanna Turoma is Professor of Russian Language and Cultural at Tampere University and holds a title of docent at the Aleksanteri Institute. Educated at the University of Helsinki and Columbia University (USA), her research and teaching interests span the interactions between culture and society, intellectual histories, and imperial and spatial knowledge production in the Eurasian context. She is the author Brodsky Abroad: Empire, Tourism, Nostalgia (University of Wisconsin Press, 2010), in Russian Бродский за границей: империя, туризм, ностальгия (NLO, 2020, transl. Denis Akhapkin). She has also co-authored several special issues and edited volumes, most recently Russia as Civilization: Politics, Media, and Academia, with K. J. Mjør (Routledge, 2021) and Geopolitics and Culture: Narrating Eastern European and Eurasian Worlds with S. Kaasik-Krogerus and S. Ratilainen (Lexington, forthcoming).

Eeva Sippola is professor of Ibero-American languages and cultures at the University of Helsinki. She has previously held positions at the University of Bremen and Aarhus University. Her research interests have a broad focus on contact linguistics and critical sociolinguistics in the Hispanic world. Sippola has published on descriptive and comparative creolistics, postcolonial language studies and sociolinguistic issues, including language endangerment and ideologies. She is the co-editor-in-chief of the Journal of Postcolonial Linguistics and currently editing the Routledge Handbook of Postcolonial and Decolonial Linguistics together with Carsten Levisen.