GloPost

Upcoming event

Beyond Representation: Knowledge production in times of war and erasure

Together, they will engage in a critical conversation on what it means to conduct research on Russia’s ongoing war in Ukraine using alternative methods of knowledge production and transmission, including archival research, speculative approaches, and sound-based practices. The roundtable explores how knowledge is shaped, mediated, and communicated under conditions in which infrastructures of representation are unstable or actively being dismantled.

Dr Ieva Gudaitytė is a music, sound and radio researcher at the University of Oslo. Her recently defended doctoral work, Listening to War Through Community Radio in Ukraine and Beyond investigates the aural politics of alternative sound media communities in Ukraine and their partners across Eastern and Central Europe. Her practice operates on the intersection of sound studies and cultural musicology. Her wider practice involves cultural journalism, creative writing, curating, teaching, and various radio work.

Di Yehorova is an interdisciplinary researcher with a background in Global Development, working at the intersection of queer and migration studies, affect theory, decolonial critique, and documentary storytelling. In their current research, they probe into counter-cartographic practices as a way to document forms of resistance and to examine speculative geographies of occupation, topologies of loss and love, and alternative modes of knowing (& remembering) that emerge when conventional epistemologies fail.

Kateryna Volochniuk (she/her) is a Ukraine-born, Scotland-based historian of photography and researcher; she is a SGSAH-funded PhD Сandidate at the University of St Andrews and a Researcher in the IWM funded Occupational Formations: Infrastructures of the Seen and Unseen working group. Volochniuk’s scholarly pursuits focus on the intersection of history of photography, memory studies and visual culture. Her ongoing research project delves into the personal archive of her grandfather Oleksii Shepeliuk. The archive has never been studied and will provide critical insights into Ukrainian Soviet-era industrial history and heritage, which exists today in a grey zone between abandonment and extinction.

Vlada Vazheyevskyy is an anthropologist and performance maker, currently doing their PhD at the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of St Andrews. Their ongoing PhD research looks at the social lives of communication infrastructures which circulate information about the temporarily occupied territories of Ukraine in Estonia amidst the accelerating enclosure of the occupied regions. They are interested in speculating on infrastructural rearrangements with their friends and interlocutors, and dis-orienting the disciplinary rigidity of anthropology through multi-modal and anti-representational methods of knowledge production. Vlada is currently the Graduate Assistant at GloPost.

Who we are and what we do

Emerging at a moment of renewed reflection on the future of Area Studies, the Centre for Global (Post)socialisms, Southeastern, Central and East European Studies asks how we might pursue intersectional, interdisciplinary engagement with the “(post)socialist world” without reproducing extractivist or exploitative research paradigms.

The Centre foregrounds the entangled realities of (post)socialisms, challenging the traditional East–West gaze and the pervasive “westsplaining” that has shaped much of the field. Beginning from the concept of entanglement, our work explores how the core questions of Area Studies resonate across diverse yet interconnected contexts — from the depopulating Latvian countryside and the Polish–Belarusian borderlands to the deindustrialising landscapes of East Lothian in Scotland and South Wales.

We recognise that it is impossible to speak of the decolonisation of public space in Estonia without engaging with the Black Lives Matter movement in the United States or the Rhodes Must Fall protests in the UK. Likewise, any discussion of war, colonialism, and public memory in Ukraine must also confront the ongoing realities of settler colonialism and the colonial legacies that continue to shape Western Europe. At its heart, the Centre is devoted to tracing and theorising these transnational, interconnected transformations of (post)socialist worlds.

The Centre is committed to amplifying the work of scholars and practitioners who are reshaping the paradigms of Area Studies. By highlighting the transformative potential of collaboration across constructed regional and disciplinary divides, we promote a critical, care-based approach to knowledge-making — one grounded in inter-regional and intersectoral solidarities.

We particularly support early career researchers whose work engages with the complex politics, economies, and social conditions of global (post)socialisms. Our members welcome enquiries about opportunities for PhD, postdoctoral, and Visiting Fellow research within our intellectually vibrant and rapidly growing community of co-thinkers.