(Dis)Comfort Zones: Resilience and its Limits

XXX. Greifswalder Ukrainicum – Greifswald Ukrainian Summer School under the scientific direction of Professor Dr. Roman Dubasevych (Greifswald) and Dr. Oleksandr Chertenko (Gießen) 

TThis year’s 30^th anniversary Greifswalder Ukrainicum explores the multifaceted, often contradictory nature of resilience, its limits, and its complex relationship to peacebuilding. It also seeks to connect Ukrainian suffering and responses to it with Europe’s intensive engagement with the traumatic events of the “extreme” twentieth century (Eric Hobsbawm). Alongside (geo)political and large-scale economic perspectives, the program places particular emphasis on grassroots strategies of resilience, survival, and coping with trauma in society and culture. Through this focus, it aims to reveal how these strategies transcend—or even subvert—official narratives, compensating for shortcomings and oversimplifications at the state or ideological level while shaping everyday practices beyond prescriptive models. Special attention will be paid to the potential of scholarship and art to unsettle society’s discursive comfort through critical interrogation, so as to avoid the fate of a new “uncomfortable place” (endroit inconvénient), as astutely documented by Jonathan Littell in his eponymous book on Babyn Yar and the war-torn Ukraine (2023).