Moderated by Emily Channell-Justice, Director of the Temerty Contemporary Ukraine Program at HURI and Nataliya Shpylova-Saeed, Preceptor in Ukrainian and head of the Ukrainian Language Program in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Harvard
Decolonizing Ukrainian Studies is an online event series featuring publications that engage with decolonial frameworks in Ukrainian studies. The series is organized by the Temerty Contemporary Ukraine Program at HURI and hosted by Emily Channell-Justice and Nataliya Shpylova-Saeed.
Decolonizing Ukraine offers an ethnographic account of the Russian occupation of Crimea since 2014 and the mass displacement it set in motion. Drawing on extensive fieldwork in Ukraine, the book centers Indigenous Crimean Tatar and Slavic communities who resisted Russian rule, treating occupation not only as a geopolitical event but as a lived condition that restructures social relations, political subjectivities, and historical consciousness. Through narratives of flight, loss, and political awakening, the book traces the emergence of a fragile yet consequential social cohesion that cuts across ethnic differences. These accounts illuminate the affective dimensions of displacement, offering a phenomenological perspective on trauma, precarity, and endurance.
Each chapter examines a distinct site of decolonization from music that mourns irreparable loss, to activism oriented toward territorial reclamation, and efforts to reframe Crimea’s past. Taken together, the ethnographic encounters demonstrate decolonization is an ongoing process rooted in cultural production, political struggle, and Indigenous political imaginaries that actively resist settler colonial logics of elimination and dispossession.
Greta Lynn Uehling is a cultural anthropologist who studies war, conflict, and population displacement, with a focus on the everyday lives of civilians. A professor at the University of Michigan, she currently teaches seminars for the Program in International and Comparative Studies at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. Her latest book, Decolonizing Ukraine (2025), makes the case that Crimea is central to understanding Ukraine and its war with Russia. Her previous book, Everyday War (Cornell University Press, 2023), rethinks civilian participation in contemporary conflict and received Harvard University’s Davis Center Book Prize. She is also the author of Beyond Memory: The Crimean Tatars’ Deportation and Return. [image source]
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LOCATION:ONLINE STATUS:CONFIRMED DTSTART:20260210T170000Z DTEND:20260210T183000Z END:VEVENT END:VCALENDAR