Drawing on the author’s research and travels, this talk will consider Ukraine’s ambiguous positioning within global cultural discourse by recourse to theories of borderlands (via Walter Mignolo and Gloria Anzaldua), hybridity and amodernity (via Bruno Latour and Donna Haraway), postcommunism and postcolonialism, and to images of anomalous zones and errant wanderings, with particular attention to Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker.

Adrian Ivakhiv is Professor of Environmental Thought and Culture at the University of Vermont’s Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources. His research focuses at the intersections of ecology, culture, identity, religion, media, and the creative arts. He is the author of Ecologies of the Moving Image: Cinema, Affect, Nature (2013), Claiming Sacred Ground: Pilgrims and Politics at Glastonbury and Sedona (2001), and executive editor of The Encyclopedia of Religion and Nature (2005). He blogs at Immanence: EcoCulture, GeoPhilosophy, MediaPolitics.