Ecologies of War: Terror Environments under and beyond Occupation of Ukraine

A lecture by Svitlana Matviyenko (Simon Fraser University) organised by the Trinity Centre for Environmental Humanities, the Trinity Centre for Resistance Studies and the Trinity Long Room Hub.

What does it mean to conduct war environmentally? What assemblages and materialities are entangled within the war environment? The talk will theorize the notion of terror environment as the realm of double targeting the population by weapons and information during the RF’s war against Ukraine. The anchoring point of such terror environment preceding the ongoing war is found at the nexus of ecocide and genocide. It has become prominent through the many acts of energy terrorism that have been deployed during the current war taking place within a colonial legacy wherein the imperial vector of terror that has long been aligned with a hidden inter-imperial vector of deterrence.

Bio
Svitlana Matviyenko is an Associate Professor of Critical Media Analysis in the School of Communication at Simon Fraser University. Her research, informed by science and technology studies and the history of science, focuses on practices of disinformation, cyberwar, popular mobilization, critical infrastructure studies, psychoanalysis of Lacan, postcolonial and decolonial theory. Matviyenko’s current work is on nuclear cultures and heritage, nuclear colonialism, technogenic catastrophes, and – most recently – the weaponization of pollution and practices of nuclear terror during the Russian war in Ukraine and in broader geopolitical contexts. She is an expert on political economy and cultural logics of cyberwarfare; political ecology of war and the environmental history of warfare. 
Matviyenko is the co-editor of The Imaginary App (MIT Press, 2014) and Lacan and the Posthuman (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). She is also the co-author of Cyberwar and Revolution: Digital Subterfuge in Global Capitalism (University of Minnesota Press, 2019), which received the 2019 book award from the Science, Technology and Art in International Relations (STAIR) section of the International Studies Association and the 2020 Gertrude J. Robinson Book Prize from the Canadian Communication Association.

Please indicate if you have any access requirements, such as ISL/English interpreting, so that we can facilitate you in attending this event. Contact: bruischk@tcd.ie