Life in Spite of Everything: Tales from the Ukrainian East
Victoria Donovan
University of St. Andrews27.3.2025, 18:30
Conference Room of the Center for Urban History
We invite you to the conversation with Victoria Donovan on her book Life in Spite of Everything: Tales from the Ukrainian East.
Since the start of Russia's war against Ukraine in 2014 and with the escalation of that war in 2022, its cities such as Bakhmut, Pokrovsk, Lysychansk or others have become familiar through the images and reports of brutal devastation. In her book, Victoria Donovan excavates a rich, multicultural history of the eastern region in Ukraine – Donbas – and paints a radically different picture.
Traveling from the dramatic, jagged peaks of Bilokuzmynivka to the marshland of Mariupol, from a warehouse rave to an abandoned gypsum mine, the physical world and its importance to this region's identity is brought to vivid life. But above all else, by speaking to those whose lives were embedded there before the escalation – curators, artists, railway workers, young people who have grown up amidst instability and destruction – Donovan amplifies local voices and reveals the intensely personal lived reality in a close proximity to the Russian aggression.
Revelatory, evocative, and deeply humane, Life In Spite of Everything is a testament to the country's past and present and its people’s tenacity, creativity, and independence.
Victoria Donovan
University of St. AndrewsProfessor of Ukrainian and East European Studies and the Director of the Centre for Global (Post)socialisms at the University of St. Andrews. She works at the intersection of heritage studies, urban history, visual anthropology, and the public humanities. Her current research, exploring entangled colonialisms and industrial extraction with a focus on the Ukrainian East, has resulted in a wide variety of outputs, from academic and non-fiction writing, exhibitions, archives, community workshops, to artistic practice.
The event will take place as within the public program of the Center for Urban History [unarchiving] and is part of the joint project of the Center for Urban History and the Center for Contemporary Culture in Dnipro "HeritEDGE: Digital Archiving and Researching" in cooperation and with the support of the University of St. Andrews. Its goal is to create a new digital archive of urban life from the destroyed and occupied territories of Ukraine for use in museum work, education, and cultural activism.
