(Un)Safe Plurality: Ukraine and Beyond

The international interdisciplinary conference is the concluding event of the joint project (Un)Disciplined: Pluralizing Ukrainian Studies—Understanding the War in Ukraine (UNDIPUS), funded by the German Federal Ministry of Research, Technology and Space. It draws some 30 international participants from the fields of political science, sociology, literary and cultural studies, linguistics, and history. Focusing on the multifaceted repercussions of the full-scale war in Ukraine on politics, history writing, and culture in Ukraine and beyond, the conference assesses the changes in the academic fields and societies involved, and examines the results of the efforts to pluralize East European Studies, literary and cultural theory since 2022. To this end, the conference situates the war in Ukraine within a broader comparative and historical context, in order to avoid essentializing it and to identify common patterns. Furthermore, it revisits established and emerging critical theories, such as post-/decolonial, transnational, gender, queer, spatial, and diversity studies, language management, cultural transfer, and entangled history, to determine the extent to which these frameworks retain their subversive power and pluralizing potential during wartime. Ultimately, it asks what kind of knowledge can provide ethical guidance in turbulent times, promote peace, and help build a better future.

The conference is organized by the UNDIPUS project in cooperation with the Institute for East European Studies at Freie Universität Berlin and the ZfL.