The Outpost of Ukraine: The Role of Dnipro in the War in Donbas
Wednesday, April 5th, 2023
| Date | Time | Location |
|---|---|---|
| Wednesday, April 5, 2023 | 4:00PM - 6:00PM | Seminar Room 108N, This is a hybrid event. For in-person attendees,the event takes place in Room 108N, North House, 1 Devonshire Place. Online attendees can join via Zoom. |
Description
After the 2014 annexation of Crimea and Russian-backed separatist movement in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions, Western and Russian observers alike assumed that Dnipropetrovsk would be the next front in Russia’s hybrid war on Ukraine. However, Dnipro underwent an unexpected transformation from the “Rocket City” clinging to its Soviet laurels into “The Outpost of Ukraine” (forpost Ukraїny), a metaphor which reflects its strategic role in both defending and protecting the state.
This presentation chronicles and analyzes the public discourses of civic nationalism that emerged in the immediate aftermath of the war in Donbas and crystallized in the years since. Drawing upon representations of Dnipro’s role in the war in the local and national media, memory institutions, and new urban spaces, journalist Olena Andriushchenko and the cultural historian Nick Kupensky show how the metaphor that Dnipro was the “outpost of Ukraine” proved to be a particularly effective new myth, one with the power to signify both strength and compassion and synthesize a wide array of civic activity: volunteering to fight, caring for IDPs, healing the wounded, and facilitating new social relations.
About the Speakers:
Nick Kupensky is an associate professor at the United States Air Force Academy, where he teaches Russian and Foreign Area Studies. He is completing a book manuscript The Soviet Industrial Sublime: The Awe and Fear of DniproHES, 1928-1945. His research on Carpatho-Rusyn, Russian, and Ukrainian modernism has appeared in Harvard Ukrainian Studies, H-Ukraine, Muzeinyi visnyk, Nationalities Papers, Richnyk Ruskoi Bursy, Ukraina Moderna, and the edited collection Ukraine’s Outpost: Dnipropetrovsk and the Russian-Ukrainian War.
Olena Andriushchenko is a journalist from Dnipro, Ukraine, where she has worked as a correspondent for the newspaper Dnepr vechernii, the director of the press center at Open TV Media, and a freelancer for Voice of America, Ukrainian People, and other American media outlets. Her research on the war in Donbas has appeared in the edited collection Ukraine’s Outpost: Dnipropetrovsk and the Russian-Ukrainian War. Her book manuscript Changed by War: A Reporter’s Notebook collects the stories of IDPs, soldiers, and volunteers.
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