Women and Materiality Amidst Russia’s War in Ukraine

Warsaw, 09.01.2025, 10:00, CEST, zoom

Women and Materiality Amidst Russia’s War in Ukraine: Between Survival, Belonging, and Solidarity Networks

„Testimonies from the War” Research Seminars Series

!!! Please note the revised time of the seminar: exceptionally, we are meeting at 10.00 to allow our speaker from a different time zone to attend.

This time, we invite you to a conversation with Iryna Skubii, a Ukrainian historian who is researching the experience of Ukrainian female refugees from the perspective of materiality.

War and its materiality are commonly associated with massive bombs, deadly missiles, piles of rubble, and boarded-up windows of abandoned houses. While this materiality is publicly visible across Ukraine’s urban and rural landscapes, there exists another layer of everyday life during war that is less noticeable but deeply woven into personal stories of survival and belonging amidst the war – individual objects of survival. Since women make up the majority of Ukraine’s displaced population, this paper focuses on the items they own, preserve, and remember.

Drawing on a selection of women’s testimonies featuring their personal belongings, this paper seeks to “unpack” the meanings of materiality in women’s war experiences, especially in their stories of displacement and migration. Building on the concept of the “materiality of survival” introduced in my previous research on the Soviet famines in Ukraine, I expand its meaning further and apply to the context of the Russo-Ukrainian war. Through narrating their stories of war via these material objects, women contribute to the creation of a shared, publicly accessible narrative of survival and forced migration, fostering solidarity networks among displaced communities in Ukraine and audiences abroad.

Iryna Skubii is the inaugural Mykola Zerov Fellow in Ukrainian Studies at the University of Melbourne. Her research examines the history of consumption, material culture, and human-environmental relationships during the Soviet famines in Ukraine, within the broader contexts of Soviet history and the periods of extremes. She is working on the monograph, “Survival Under Extremes: Human, Environmental, and Material Relationships Amidst the Soviet Famines in Ukraine.” In her new research, she examines the economic, environmental, and cultural history of sunflowers in Ukraine.

Chair: Anna Wylegała, leader if the “Testimonies from the War” project in Poland.

The seminar will be conducted in English.

Please register at: publicrelations@ifispan.edu.pl. You will receive the link to the zoom meeting upon registration.

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