1st Edition
Psychosocial and Cultural Perspectives on the War in Ukraine Imprints and Dreamscapes
This innovative and important book explores how war imprints on culture and the psychosocial effects of war on individuals and societies, based on the first few months after the outbreak of war in Ukraine in 2022.
The book approaches the conflict in Ukraine through the prism of creative and artistic material alongside scholarly analysis to highlight the multiplicity of subjective experiences. Essays are complemented by material from the ‘war diaries’, which comprise day diaries, dream diaries, artistic and poetic material composed by students and academics in February and March 2022. With chapters focusing on fear, ruptures and resistance, the book examines different aspects of subjective, cultural and embodied experiences of war. It examines elements that dominant perspectives of war often overlook; the quotidian, personal and emotive ways that war is registered individually and collectively in societies and cultures.
Highlighting different narratives that illuminate the complex effects of war, this book is highly relevant for postgraduate students, researchers and advanced undergraduate students in the fields of cultural psychology, psychosocial studies, peace and conflict studies and cultural history.
Chapter 4, Chapter 5, Chapter 7 and Chapter 10 of this book are freely available as downloadable Open Access PDFs at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.
To read the online archive of Two Months of War, please visit the Urban Media Archive of the Center for Urban History (Lviv, Ukraine): https://uma.lvivcenter.org/en/collections/178/interviews
Introduction
Bohdan Shumylovych and Magdalena Zolkos
Part I: Recording Lived Experiences of War through Diaries, Images and Dreams
Chapter 1. Collective Practice of Meditation and Phenomenology of Consciousness in War
Ihor Kolesnyk
Chapter 2. ‘The Production of Fireflies’: Searching for Truth and Truthfulness in the Diaries and Images of War, Conversation with Bohdan Shumylovych
Bohdan Shumylovych and Magdalena Zolkos
Chapter 3. The Emotional and Psychological Registers of War: Conversation with Natalka Ilchyshyn
Bohdan Shumylovych, Magdalena Zolkos, and Natalka Ilchyshyn
EXCERPTS FROM DIARIES OF WAR AND LIFE (1)
Part II: The Ruptures and Ruins of War
Chapter 4. Dreaming of War
Stephen Frosh
Chapter 5. ‘The Word Remains’: War Diaries in Ruptured Time and Space
Magda Schmukalla
Chapter 6. The Image in Ruins
Martta Heikkilä
Chapter 7. Quiet Trauma and the War in Ukraine
Chari Larsson
EXCERPTS FROM DIARIES OF WAR AND LIFE (2)
Part III: Resistance, Endurance, Testimony
Chapter 8. Unexpected Shapes of Courage: Emotions of Resistance in Ukraine
Marguerite La Caze
Chapter 9. The Determination to Resist: Dumky by Young Ukrainians
Luisa Passerini
Chapter 10. Testimony, Endurance, Tryvoga: A History Open to Shivering Bodies
Magdalena Zolkos
Biography
Bohdan Shumylovych is an Associate Professor of Cultural Studies at the Ukrainian Catholic University. He also works at the Center for Urban History in Lviv, Ukraine.
Magdalena Zolkos is an Associate Professor in the Department of Social Sciences and Philosophy at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland.
‘This beautifully wrought, multi-layered, multivocal book captures the imprint of the “war experience” in Ukraine: on the body and the soul, on sense and memory (collective and singular), on knowing and unknowing, on loss, care, ruin, and survival. It challenges the very notion of trauma’s “inability to be represented” by taking the time to dwell in the lived realities and dreamscapes of civilians for whom war is an enduring experience. Drawing upon visual, personal, philosophical, and historiographic approaches, the contributors paint for us a complex yet intimate portrait of people facing precarity and violence who, nonetheless and despite, remain in place.’
Jeanne Morefield, Associate Professor at the Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Oxford, UK
‘Psychosocial and Cultural Perspectives on the War in Ukraine: Imprints and Dreamscapes brings together diaries, testimonies, visual material documenting the war and its effects on an individual life. This raw material of war is set in the elaborated analytical framework that draws on psychoanalysis, philosophy, sociology, and cultural studies and helps the readers to understand the workings of war through the human existence. A powerful book which will leave a haunting and unforgettable imprint in anyone who reads it.’
Yuliya Yurchuk, Assistant Professor at Södertörn University, Sweden
‘This is a deeply moving and highly relevant collection. It is good to see nuanced thought in these troubling times.’
Astrid Erll, Professor at Goethe University Frankfurt and The Frankfurt Memory Studies Platform, Germany
