Ecologies of identity   . . . in Ukraine & East/Central Europe

Nianio at the 'Center of Europe' in Rakhiv, Ukraine. Photo courtesy of Jennifer Dickinson.
Ukraine-EU Border Identities
Click to read: “Stoking the Heart of (a Certain) Europe: Crafting Hybrid Identities in Ukrainian-European Borderlands.”  Spaces of Identity 6: 1 (2006), 11-44.
What does it mean for a small town in the Ukrainian Carpathians (or another in Lithuania, and another in Poland) to call itself the geographic center and heart of Europe? Or for a leading art center in the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv, to host an exhibition of Polish art immersed in the Eastern or 'Byzantine' identities of the Ukrainian-Polish borderlands? How are the border spaces between Ukraine and the EU being refigured in national and local artistic discourses?

“Spaces at an Exhibition: Immersive Passages through Central/Eastern European Identities,” Занурення/Zanurzenie/Immersion exhibition catalogue, ed. Jerzy Onuch (Kyiv, Ukraine: Centre for Contemporary Art), pp. 11-19. Ukrainian version reprinted in Krytyka VII (12), 2004, on-line version.





  
Scenes from the Sheshory Festival of Ethnic Music and Land Art (2004) in the village of Sheshory, Carpathian mountains
Carpathians in Transition:
Culture, Identity, and Transboundary Cooperation at the EU's Eastern Border
(grant project in development, with Dr. Saleem Ali)

With the recent expansion of the European Union to encompass several former Eastern Bloc countries, Europe’s new ‘Schengen’ border now runs down the middle of the continent’s largest mountain chain, the Carpathian mountains. While the stricter new border regulations are expected to present a setback for economic development of non-EU border regions, a series of transboundary initiatives, including the Carpathian Euroregion, the Carpathian Ecoregion Initiative, and the Carpathian Convention, have begun to focus on developing a broadly ‘ecoregional’ strategy for sustainable development. In the light of these seemingly contradictory developments and of the complex ethnic fabric of the region, this research project will examine the role of cultural and regional identity in affecting the possibilities for regional transboundary cooperation in the Carpathian basin. It will trace the development of cross-border cooperation between the nations involved and the levels of local and regional participation in such cooperation, and will test the hypothesis that environmental conservation can play an instrumental role in transboundary and inter-ethnic peace-building. In the process, it will attempt to identify both obstacles and opportunities for further development of a Carpathian regional sustainable development strategy.

Romancing the Steppes
Nature, Nation, and Deep Identity in Post-Soviet Ukraine
This study focuses on the uses of and contestations over prehistory, especially over archaeological materials and imagined reconstructions of the ancient cultures of Ukraine (Slavic, proto-Slavic, Scythian, Trypillian, Indo-European/Indo-Aryan), by the Native Faith movement and related traditionalist developments in literature, the arts, and the educational system. Promoting a “native” Ukrainian identity as a form of resistance to cultural globalization, Westernization, and/or Russian cultural domination, these movements can be viewed as forms of postcolonial liberation, far-right nationalism, or as parts of a broader East European and Eurasian trend toward ethnically defined “cultural ecology.” This research stems from previous work I have done on Ukrainian environmentalism and nationalism, and is part of a longer-term project on landscape and heritage in Ukraine.

Jumping over the Kupalo fires, midsummer's day, 2004, Trukhaniv Island in the Dnipro river, Kyiv

 

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Photos from Kamiana Mohyla, rock monument with ancient petroglyphs in the area of Melitopil, southeast Ukraine
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