Please join us for another lecture in the Ukrainian Energy Studies series! The Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 has confirmed not only the centrality of energy to the war, but also the importance of Ukraine to global energy policy, with its far-reaching economic, environmental, and cultural consequences. This interdisciplinary series, co-organized by the Jordan Center for the Advanced Study of Russia at NYU and the East European, Russian, Caucasian, and Central Asian Faculty Network at the University of Colorado Boulder, will explore the concept of energy as a shaping force in Ukrainian cultural and political history; the aesthetics of particular energy sources (fossil fuels, nuclear energy, renewables) in Ukrainian literature, film, and other media; the Russia-Ukraine energy nexus; Ukrainian energy markets; and environmental effects of energy production, consumption, and catastrophe.
Asia Bazdyrieva's recent research tests the hypothesis that through colonial expansionists projects of both Western European States and the Russian Empire (operating through cartography, texts, images, geological prospecting, etc.) the territories of present-day Ukraine were imaged and imagined as a territory of inexhaustible resources that can feed the entire world. In her presentation, she will talk about resourcification by looking at sociotechnical imaginaries that contribute to the making of a resource through arranging substances, technologies, discourses and practices deployed by different kinds of actors (Richardson 20214). This framework is productive in order to see how Ukraine’s territory and its people are imagined as a component of material exchange, as well as to see how the notion of the territory as a resource justifies a spatial organization that enables slow violence and environmental damage while equating the human population and life at large to geological, agricultural, and other forms of matter with usable material capacities.
This event will be held virtually as a Zoom meeting.
Asia Bazdyrieva is an art historian whose research spans visual culture and environmental humanities at large. Her projects focus on Soviet modernity and its ideological and material implications in spaces, bodies, and lands. She holds an MA in Art History from City University of New York and an MS in Analytical Chemistry from the Kyiv National University. She was a Fulbright scholar in 2015–2017, an Edmund S. Muskie fellow (2017), a Digital Earth Fellow (2018). Bazdyrieva co-authored ‘Geocinema’ — a collaborative project exploring the possibilities of a “planetary” notion of cinema. Concerned with the understanding and sensing of the earth while being on the ground, the project includes vastly distributed processes of image and meaning making. She is currently a resident at Transmediale (Berlin) and a Ph.D. candidate at MAKE/SENSE program between Critical Media Lab and University of Arts and Design Linz.
