immanence

I’ll be giving an online public talk called “The Invasion of Ukraine as a Turning Point?” for the University of California Santa Barbara this Tuesday at 4 pm Pacific Standard Time (7 pm Eastern US/Canada time, 11 pm GMT). It hinges on the idea that the Russian invasion, like other unexpected “hyper-events” (such as the Covid-19 pandemic or the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster), may provide a historical “inflection point” at which rearrangements of agency — that is, rearrangement of the structural forces and capacities by which human potentials are shaped and constrained — could occur. There’s of course no guarantee that they will occur, or that the rearrangements will be for the better and not for the worse. But it’s good to know what kinds of rearrangements might be possible, so that we could better act on them.

The Invasion of Ukraine as a Turning Point

What are the implications of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, in the hindsight of its first six weeks, for world affairs? This talk by Adrian Ivakhiv will highlight the role of media and “information war,” the refugee crisis, and policy responses by western and other countries, to understand how the invasion and its apparent failure could reshape the possibilities for global cooperation on other challenges including climate change, refugeeism and migration, and democratic and authoritarian politics. 4:00 pm on Tuesday, April 5th, 2022 via Zoom (Zoom ID: 825 9988 6556).

Adrian Ivakhiv is Professor of Environmental Thought and Culture and Steven Rubenstein Professor for Environment and Natural Resources at the University of Vermont. He is currently a visiting scholar at UCSB’s Carsey-Wolf Center, where he is researching global media and the changing “information ecosystem.” His most recent book is Shadowing the Anthropocene: Eco-Realism for Turbulent Times (2018). He has conducted research in Ukraine since 1989 and writes about Ukraine at UKR-TAZ: A Ukrainian Temporary Autonomous Zone.

Sponsored by the Department of Germanic and Slavic Studies and the Graduate Center for Literary Research at the University of California, Santa Barbara.