Crisis as the Potential for Collective Action: Violence and Humanitarianism on the Polish-Ukrainian Border

Iwona Kaliszewska (University of Warsaw), with Elisabeth Cullen Dunn

March 5, 15-16  (Helsinki Time, EET)

The notion of crisis once referred to the short, sharp shock of an acute event.  Today, it refers more broadly to any event that ruptures stable historical narratives, disrupts once-indisputable teleologies and opens new and undesirable visions of the future.  For volunteers in Poland working to support Ukrainian refugees and the Ukrainian military, the Russian invasion of Ukraine posed a crisis because it challenged the supposed inevitability of Poland’s membership in the EU and in the West more generally, threatening to catapult Poland back into a history of war and Russian domination.   But for the volunteers, the crisis was also a temporality in which their own actions took on outsize importance, allowing them to attempt to shape history as they worked on seemingly mundane tasks of provisioning and transport. The presentation is based on field research conducted in Ukraine and in the Polish-Ukrainian borderlands between March 2022 and February 2023. 

Iwona Kaliszewska is an Assistant Professor at the Institute of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Warsaw. Her research focuses on intersections among Islam, state and anti-state violence, and more recently on war and humanitarian crisis. Iwona has been conducting research projects in Dagestan and Chechnya since 2004, and lately in the Polish-Ukrainian borderlands. Her most recent book “For Putin and for Sharia. Dagestani Muslims and the Islamic State” has recently been published by the Cornell University Press. 

Registration link: https://elomake.helsinki.fi/lomakkeet/128473/lomake.html

Photo by Iwona Kaliszewska

Starting from the covid-19 pandemic, aggravating police violence and repressions in Belarus and Russia, a cascade of dramatic circumstances in Central and Eastern Europe put many lives on the edge of loss and death; and the scale of catastrophe has greatly exacerbated since the beginning of Russian invasion into Ukraine. The dominant top-down perspectives on geopolitics, security and “bare life” have overshadowed everyday material practices through which people maintain, continue and repair their social lives in times of the ongoing catastrophic events of the current decade.

Offering a reparative lens to geopolitical narratives, we examine the shadow underside of the collapsing times, the labour that goes into making, sustaining and reproducing life itself – what we, following feminist scholarship, call life-making labour.

The project deals with the central research question: what makes social life continue when lives are breaking? To address it, we draw on the feminist political economy literature that has centred the labour of social reproduction – activities, attitudes, affects and relationships that go directly into maintaining social life daily and intergenerationally – as fundamental for making life itself possible. Methodologically, our project relies on participant observation and in-depth interviews, which each project member will conduct in their respective fieldwork sites, together composing a joint multi-sited ethnographic study of life-making.

We offer three ethnographic cases: 1. Ukrainian migrant communities in Warsaw, 2. Belarusian political refugees in Lithuania, 3. volunteer groups hosting Ukrainian refugees in their homes in Finland. Through engagement with multiple ethnographic sites, we examine life-making practices across geographic locations in the times begging for research on invisibilised aspects of reproduction of the life itself.

LIFEMAKE is a 4 year project supported by KONE Foundation.

The project team is Dr. Daria Krivonos, Dr. Olga Tkach and MA Roman Urbanowicz. The project is based at the Centre for Research on Ethnic Relations and Nationalism, CEREN, University of Helsinki.