From June 26 to 29, Uzhhorod hosted the RUTA Annual Conference 2025, this year titled Imagination: New Vision and Connections. Over four days, the event explored imagination as a tool for rethinking solidarity, colonial legacies, and memory.
INDEX’s community was represented by Head of institution Sasha Dovzhyk, former Program Coordinator Yuliia Kishchuk, and 2024 Fellow Johana Kotišová. Here’s a quick look at what our amazing community members shared:
— Sasha Dovzhyk moderated the panel Surviving, remembering, storytelling and joined the discussion Documenting atrocities and seeking justice, focusing on the role of narrative and documentation in the face of war and violence.
— Yuliia Kishchuk moderated the roundtable (Re)imagining climate justice and solidarity in the RUTA region(s), and also spoke on a pannel about war, colonial legacies in the region, and Ukrainian-Palestinian experiences of trauma and displacement.
—Johana Kotišová spoke on the panel Beyond re-presentation, presenting her research "Towards ‘strong objectivity’: Emotions in Ukrainian metajournalistic discourse.”
RUTA Association for Central, South-Eastern, and Eastern European, Baltic, Caucasus, Central, and Northern Asian Studies launched its annual conference to reimagine knowledge-making. The conference explored new approaches rooted in the academic, cultural, and liberation traditions of the RUTA regions, while also seeking global connections.
