Invisible University for Ukraine. Essays on Democracy at War, ed. by Ostap Sereda, Balázs Trencsényi, Tetiana Zemliakova, Guillaume Lancereau, Ithaka/London (Cornell University Press) 2024.
It is a global phenomenon: Universities around the world are under massive pressure—from defunding, subjugation to market logic, the elimination of entire departments, political interventions, and attacks on academic freedom and freedom of teaching, to the targeted physical destruction of university buildings, the killing of scientists, and “scholasticide” when the aim is to strike at an entire people. Since 2022, the Invisible University for Ukraine (IUFU) has been offering online courses for Ukrainian students to help them work through their war experiences and the genocidal threat posed by Russian aggression, using innovative academic methods; almost 1,000 students have benefited from the courses so far. The collection “Invisible University for Ukraine. Essays on Democracy at War,” published just under a year ago, features very moving personal contributions from students and professors at the highest level of reflection in the Ukrainian context, showing what one would wish for in any other context: a new, honest, unreserved way of generating knowledge at the university.
“The need for uncommon institutional responses to the autocratic pressure on higher education has been a recurring topic of discussion since the late 2000s,” write Ostap Sereda und Balázs Trencsényi in the introduction; as early as that, the “Western” model of university education had already lost credibility in Eastern Europ. “The Invisible University was also a response to this crisis of academia, experimenting, under the pressure of an unprecedented situation of mass dislocation of students and scholars, to relink the educational, research, and civic components in unconventional and innovative ways.” The Invisible University does not see itself as a solitary entity, but rather as part of a cross-temporal and cross-spatial network, connected to other similar initiatives in the 20th and 21st centuries, in a history that is briefly and impressively traced in the introduction.
These initiatives, whether online or offline, have and always had a few things in common: a transnational, global perspective that combines global and regional perspectives and transcends national boundaries; a radically democratic approach that seeks dialogue rather than hierarchies; and a connection between the academic and the existential dimensions. The Russian war against Ukraine is the immediate catalyst for the Invisible University for Ukraine and the conditioner of its tensions, specifically: Although the IUFU works against Eurocentrism and uses postcolonial tools, it sees itself in a struggle that is, in addition to survival, about insisting on common “European” values. It must endure the fact that its civil engagement can conflict with the survival imperatives of war when it becomes critical of its own government. And it faces the (resolved) dilemma of how to deal with Russian colleagues as its main goal is to work toward a non-Russocentric understanding of the post-Soviet space and as it consistently boycots all Russian state institutions.
The individual contributions show how the existential and the academic can be integrated and convey different, complementary lessons from the war. It is above all the dramatic changes in the concept of time brought about by the war – the altered temporalities – that have a profound effect on knowledge. The contributions spell out what this means in concrete terms: in the daily struggle for survival with the “sobering absurdity of death” (Denys Tereshchenko), where sacrifices are demanded and one makes them, or one doesn’t; in dealing with the media side of the war, the “digital witnessing” in the face of a volatile global public, and the ignorance of even well-intentioned reactions; but above all in readjusting the relationship between participation and observation in research and teaching. Only through honest dialogue can a future remain conceivable with new ideas – “my war is about creating spaces of dialogue” (Balázs Trencsényi). The feeling of “professional failure,” of “should have known” (Diána Vonnák), “wading through unmetabolized experience and a cacophony of guesswork, motivated speech, misinformation, and rudimentary analysis,” is made fruitful as a lesson in epistomology: “We could call it a fog of war in the epistemic sense, but if we flip this around, this fog is ever-present, the stuff of fieldwork, and navigating it is a predicament of any contemporary empirical research.”
The anthology ends with an overview of all the courses that IUFU has taught since 2022 and the very moving and sometimes also funny short biographies of the contributors in the shadow of war. Tetiana Zemliakova, for example, who, apart from the IUFU, can only focus on the ontology of time: “She always knew she was living through the last days of historical humankind, but she could never guess these would be so stupid.”
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