Geographers on the Russian Invasion:
The Geopolitics of the War in Ukraine

Friday, March 25, 2022
12:00 PM - 1:30 PM EST

Hosted by Roosevelt House Public Policy Institute at Hunter College

Sponsored by the Department of Geography and Environmental Science, Hunter College, CUNY, and the Department of Political Science and Global Affairs, and Geography Program, College of Staten Island, CUNY

Announcing a webinar discussion with notable political geographers who have familiarity and expertise on the topic of geopolitics in post-Soviet space and on the Russian invasion of Ukraine and its ramifications. Please join us to have the opportunity to learn more and ask questions to our esteemed panelists. 

Co-organized and co-moderated by CUNY faculty, Dr. Peter Kabachnik (College of Staten Island and the Graduate Center) and Dr. Marianna Pavlovskaya (Hunter College and the Graduate Center).

PANELISTS

John Biersack is an independent scholar and received his PhD in Geography from the University of Kansas. His work focuses on Ukraine, Russia, critical geopolitics, scale, borders, and the concept of Eurasia.

Jessica Graybill is an Associate Professor in the Russian and Eurasian Studies Program at Colgate University researching energy and climate change-induced transformations of postsocialist, urban, and remote regions.  She addresses the resilience of people and places, working with local communities in Russia and the Arctic to imagine more sustainable futures.

Peter Kabachnik, Professor of Geography at the College of Staten Island-CUNY and the Graduate Center-CUNY, focuses on geographies of authoritarianism and how personality cults serve as political technologies of discipline and sociospatial control. His other research has examined contemporary understandings of Stalin and the Soviet era in Georgia; and Georgian IDPs.

Shannon O’Lear is Professor of Geography in the Geography and Atmospheric Science Department and the Director of the Environmental Studies Program at the University of Kansas. She has done work in the South Caucasus, and her current work involves environmental geopolitics and slow violence.

Beth Mitchneck, Professor Emerita at the University of Arizona, specializes in research on forced migration due to violent conflict. She has conducted extensive field research in Georgia about displaced people due to the conflict in Abhkazia and the Russian invasion of South Ossetia as well as in Ukraine after the first Russian invasion in 2014.

Marianna Pavlovskaya is Chair of the Department of Geography and Environmental Science at Hunter College. She is also a faculty member at CUNY Graduate Center. Her research focuses on urban space and geographies of diverse economies and solidarity economies. She has studied socio-economic transformations in Russia since the 1990s. Her recent work examined the emergence of ontologies of poverty there.

Nathaniel Ray Pickett has a Master’s Degree from the Center for Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies program at the University of Kansas and is completing his PhD in the Department of Geography and Atmospheric Sciences in Spring 2022, also at KU. His most recent work is on the political geographies of post-Chornobyl Ukraine.

Gerard Toal is a Political Geographer at Virginia Tech’s campus in the greater Washington DC region. He is the author of the book: Near Abroad: Putin, the West and the Contest over Ukraine and the Caucasus.​

More details at http://www.roosevelthouse.hunter.cuny.edu/events/geographers-russian-invasion-geopolitics-war-ukraine/.