Solidarity Networking and Ukrainian Mental Maps:
Russia’s War against Ukraine and The February 24th Archive Project
About the Lecture:
I am an East European intellectual and political historian by training, and a student of map prejudices by practice. For a digitally activist Ukraine, the February 24th Archive is a polyphonic treasure trove of solidarity and resistance to Russia's war of aggression. My archive bridges six main multilingual groups: (1) professionally trained field experts in Ukrainian Studies; (2) interested nonspecialists in and beyond academe; (3) leading journalists; (4) OSINT amateurs and mapmakers, who catalogue war crimes and build cases with evidence for criminal prosecution; (5) diplomats and policymakers; and (6) most crucially, a voting citizenry that crosses ideological lines, hoping to raise literacy against malignant disinformation. While we commonly think about how social media divides and polarizes in 2024, I will introduce strategies on how I have worked against over the past three years against currents of unseen algorithms on digital platforms. I take inspiration for my ongoing Twitter/X war archive from scholarly work in the history of social and radical cartography, and ongoing Ukrainian war documenting projects. My goal for the February 24th Archive is to respect Ukrainian privacy and ethical issues toward a future Nuremberg tribunal moment, while basing a rolling public war digital record in a daily working Global Commons which is too often flooded with disinformation.
About the Speaker:
Steven Seegel is Professor of Slavic and Eurasian Studies at The University of Texas at Austin. He is the author of Map Men: Transnational Lives and Deaths of Geographers in the Making of East Central Europe (University of Chicago Press, 2018); just translated into Russian (Academic Studies Press, 2024); Ukraine under Western Eyes (Harvard University Press, 2013); and Mapping Europe's Borderlands: Russian Cartography in the Age of Empire (University of Chicago Press, 2012). He has been a contributor to Chicago's international history of cartography series, and he has translated over 300 entries from Russian and Polish for the US Holocaust Memorial Museum's Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, 1933-1945, in multiple volumes, published jointly by USHMM and Indiana University Press. Professor Seegel is a former director at Harvard University of the Ukrainian Research Institute's summer exchange program. From 2019 to 2022, he hosted 89 author-feature podcast interviews on the popular New Books Network. He is the founder of The February 24th Archive, an ongoing 24-hour community-driven, public-facing digital project focused on building global solidarity for Ukrainians, with 1000s of threads and averaging 30 million people in 75 countries per month across the world. Professor Seegel was awarded the Vega Medal of 2024 by the Swedish Society for Anthropology and Geography (SSAG) for his scientific contributions to human geography. He received the gold medal from King Carl XVI Gustav of Sweden on 22 April, celebrated annually as Earth Day.