“Is Global Solidarity Possible Amidst the Radical Simultaneity of Crises?: Ukrainian Perspectives”
A SERIES OF WEBINARS EXPLORING STRATEGIES FOR CULTIVATING POSSIBILITY IN DEFIANCE OF BRUTALISM
Sponsored by the the SFU Institute for the Humanities, J. S. Woodsworth Chair in the Humanities and EcoCultureLab Vancouver.
ABOUT THE SESSION
“Is Global Solidarity Possible Amidst the Radical Simultaneity of Crises?: Ukrainian Perspectives”
This webinar will feature a panel of Ukrainian authors and scholars connected to the volume Terra Invicta: Ukrainian Wartime Reimaginings for a Habitable Earth speaking on the ‘multipolarizing’ world order, the rise of authoritarianism and neo-imperialism, and connections between the Russo-Ukrainian war and other world events, from Gaza to Iran to Venezuela to Greenland.
What can a Ukrainian wartime perspective offer toward a global understanding of the crises currently facing humanity? What place do notions of sovereignty, “ecosovereignty,” and the connections between ecocide and genocide play in conflicts around the world?
Speakers will include award-winning filmmaker Oleksiy Radynski, whose films include Chornobyl 22 (2023) and Special Operation (2025); Darya Tsymbalyuk, author of Ecocide in Ukraine: The Environmental Cost of Russia’s War (2025); Kateryna Botanova, editor of Reclaiming History: Decoloniality and Art in Ukraine after 1991 (2025) and Sahara: A Thousand Paths into the Future (2024); visual artists Nikita Kadan, Taras Polataiko, Yuri Yefanov, and Iryna Zamuruieva; and other contributors to Terra Invicta. The event will be hosted and moderated by the volume’s editor Adrian Ivakhiv.
ABOUT THE SERIES
In his book Brutalism, African philosopher Achille Mbembe defines his titular term as “the process through which power as a geomorphic force is constituted, expressed, reconfigured, and reproduced through acts of fracturing and fissuring.” Borrowing the term from architecture, Mbembe aims to capture “an age gripped by the planetary-scale pathos of demolition and production of stocks of darkness,” a “becoming-black of the world” that parallels the enslavement of African bodies in the Atlantic slave trade by an imposition of the logic of war onto populations with nowhere else to go. Military designs are, in this sense, added to today’s pressures of changing climates, deteriorating environments, competition for dwindling resources, and the dismantling of public service systems, as powerful interests engineer fear, confusion, and disengagement while touting the false solutions of “reborderizing,” ethnonational wall-building, and the technological evasions of geo-engineering and artificial intelligence.
In this context, where can we find causes as well as realistic strategies for creative hope toward a more life-enhancing, difference-harboring, and ecologically viable world? “Creative hope” is not the idle hope of facile optimism; it is the active effort to find and seize opportunities for creating a better world than the one being handed to us. It is a radical hope (radic-, radix is Latin for “root”) because it identifies and removes the obstructions toward the flourishing of human and nonhuman life in its beauty and diversity. It reverses the brutal reduction of humans to mobile laborers and consumers, and of the world to resource and datafied commodity.
This series of “first Tuesday” noon-time webinars will explore the work of artists, critical thinkers, digital activists, and communities responding to the challenges of war, authoritarianism, disaster, and climate change in ways that build the possibilities for hopeful, collaborative, and richly more-than-human futures.
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TIME AND PLACE Tuesday, March 3rd, 2026 12:00PM Pacific Time Zoom Webinar (registration required)
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CONTACT
Huyen Pham
Communications Coordinator
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