Now on view at the Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art in Warsaw: a contemporary Ukrainian art exhibition on Crimea, memory & displacement. Featuring Emine Ziyatdin. Open through 28 June 2026. tinyurl.com/5ypsu77n

Devastating news from Ukraine as the full-scale Russian invasion continues

In London this May? Visit Kazakhstani artist Almagul Menlibayeva’s exhibition at Frieze No.9 Cork Street, curated by RUTA member Diana Kudaibergen. Exploring mythology, ecology & postcoloniality in Central Asia. Open through 30 May. tinyurl.com/3dh5ynub

We encourage RUTA members to join us in Prague, or online, for the international conference Culture, Identity, and Social Justice: Anti-Racist Perspectives in Romani Studies and Beyond (29–30 May 2026). tinyurl.com/2kpta3np

Very excited about our 1st featured panel at the 2026 RUTA conference in the Carpathian Mountains, Ukraine, especially as someone currently writing a book that puts Seye Abimbola’s critique of the foreign gaze in dialogue with resonant critiques written by Czechoslovak feminist theorists in the 90s

Congratulations! 🙌

New book of crucial importance! www.cambridge.org/core/element...

Recommending this text by Maria Sonevytsky on the meaning of house keys for Crimean Tatars, following 1940s Soviet deportations and genocide under Stalin, and the Palestinians since the Nakba. Maria read it at our RUTA conference in Ukraine last summer and it was so incredibly powerful and moving

Key texts on Crimean Tatar history and the harmful legacy of Russian-Soviet colonialism and genocides

Here’s a recording of our RUTA webinar in solidarity with Crimean Tatars under Russian occupation - deeply insightful discussion with Emine Ziyatdin, Mariia Shynkarenko and Elzara Halimova, moderated by Martin Kisly, founder of the Crimean Studies Center of National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy

Qırım serbest olacaq!

We are excited to share one of the panels that will be featured at our upcoming RUTA conference. Bringing together scholars and practitioners working across the RUTA region(s), the session explores tensions between global knowledge production, imperial epistemologies, and local practices of care.

We’re excited to share the release of a timely and important new text for our RUTA communities! The publication is available free to access and download until June 1st. www.cambridge.org/core/element...

RUTA is looking for members to join our Fundraising Committee. We are especially seeking people with experience in donor engagement to help support the sustainability of our conference and initiatives. Interested? Contact Mark Edele: [email protected]

Today, May 18th, marks the Day of Remembrance for the Victims of the Genocide of the Crimean Tatar People. On this day in 1944, the Soviet regime began the brutal, forced deportation of the Crimean Tatar population from their ancestral homeland.

RUTA members may be interested in “We Were Never the Center?: Epistemic Rebuilding in Ukraine and the Post-Soviet Space,” hosted by the Ukraine Decolonial Studies Network. Online, 20 May. Register here: tinyurl.com/3vwxnhec

Every year, we receive far more applications from scholars, artists and social justice advocates than we can include in the program. Still, we want all waitlisted and fellow keen thinkers to be part of the conversation. Now, we finally have a venue with greater capacity—join us in the RUTA audience!

A crucial edited volume that will be of great interest to our RUTA communities

Registration for non-presenting participants is now open for the RUTA Annual Conference 2026 — Rooted Knowledges and Dialogues for Change, taking place 12–15 July 2026 in the Carpathian Mountains, Ukraine. The registration deadline is 27 May 2026. Register here: ruta-association.org/rooted-knowl...

🇭🇺🎶 For the first time in Hungarian history, 'The forest is green / Pădure vergyé', the Hungarian Roma community's anthem — which gained that status after a 1993 civil rights protest — was played in parliament, at Prime Minister Péter Magyar's suggestion. Many MPs were in tears, and so was I.

Join us on Friday for this crucial and much needed new webinar series on RUTA - Latin America dialogues, bringing together critical thinkers from Europe’s East, the Baltic, Central Asia (for the start) and various LatAm contexts. Thanks to Manuel Férez Gil for initiating this series from Chile!

One BIG problem though. Kazakhstan pavilion in Venice was supposed to have this work of Asel Kadyrkhanova on Stalinist repressions as one of the central pieces at the exhibit. The vice minister of culture of Kazakhstan came to “inspect” it the day before pre-opening & ordered to remove it

Zhanna Kadyrova’s Security Guarantees confronts the legacy of the Budapest Memorandum not as a distant chapter in history, but as a living reality shaped by the consequences of its collapse. Rather than retreating into abstraction, the project follows the concrete paths left by these broken promises

💔 At this year’s Venice Biennale, the “Invisible Pavilion” highlights the human cost of Russia’s war against Ukraine. The unofficial project spans venues across Venice, honoring cultural figures whose lives and work were cut short by the war. 🧵 1/4

We invite you to join our next webinar “Europe's East and Latin America in dialogue: what we (mis)understand about each other?” with Ieva Giedraityté, @oonuch.bsky.social & @ferezmanuel14.bsky.social, in the RUTA-LatAm dialogue series May 8, 18.00 Kyiv Register: us06web.zoom.us/webinar/regi...

For me, these are crucial questions, especially in regard to the European research infrastructure that replicates stark East-West inequalities. For example, in 2024 the ERC @erc.europa.eu awarded 249 out of 255 Advanced Grants (aka 97.65%‼️) to predominantly Western European research institutions

"Grant and job applications in the West are commonly reviewed by Western scholars who have been embedded within the very academic structures that have systematically devalued and epistemically marginalized the scholarship and perspectives of researchers from Europe’s East and beyond." 1/2

Thank you for reading and sharing my text on what it’s been like to migrate around the world as an ‘Eastern European researcher’ working in various corners of Western academia. From experience and many many conversations, I know this will resonate with so many scholars in our research communities

RUTA member Olga Burlyuk and Ladan Rahbari’s new book From the Margins brings together diverse voices, delving deep into the notions of privilege, migration, and precarity, revealing how academic hierarchies and colonial legacies shape everyday experiences of belonging, vulnerability, and resilience

If in Berlin, join tomorrow's talk of our RUTA co-founder, philosopher Tereza Hendl, on European East-West knowledge inequalities and the need for their remedying. The discussion will be held by the Semi-Peripheral Theory working group run by RUTA member Zaal Andronikashvili and colleagues

TODAY! - 'The Pitfalls of Global Campism' (@associationruta.bsky.social) (14.00 CET) Registration: us06web.zoom.us/webinar/regi...

Join us tomorrow, April 21 at 15:00 EEST Kyiv / 14:00 CET

We invite you to our webinar “The Pitfalls of Campism: Global Perspectives” April 21 · 15:00 EEST (Kyiv). Voices from Iran, Syria, Venezuela & Ukraine unpack how global left “campism” misreads struggles, excuses authoritarianism, erases local agency. Join us: tinyurl.com/3kh57f4h

Powerful webinar by the Indigenous-Ukrainian Relationship Initiative with talk by Niigaan Sinclair (Peguis First Nation) titled "Ukrainian people are my people too: An Indigenous perspective on relationality, war, and reconciliation." Watch: tinyurl.com/354sj5bk Learn more: tinyurl.com/35mzn3x4

Just starting, and it will be a vital conversation. As I said before it’s always so insightful and meaningful to hear Rita Adel, who comes from a Palestinian-Ukrainian family. She spoke at our RUTA conference in Ukraine last year and it was one of the most powerful panels in a completely packed room

Excited to share forthcoming volume: Introducing Central Asia & the South Caucasus, edited by RUTA member Erica Marat. Amplifying young scholars from the regions who present fresh, grounded, and often deeply personal perspectives. Pre-order here today: tinyurl.com/2x5na7b3

Resharing our important RUTA conversation on International Romani Day. Have a listen to Magda Matache and Madeline Potter’s insights, and if you can, ask your libraries to order their books — The Roma: A Traveling History and The Permanence of Anti-Racism: Unuttered Sentences — for their collections

tinyurl.com/romani-day-p... Prague is celebrating International Romani Day with art, music, literature, community events, and powerful public gestures across the city.

💥 New leaked calls — transcripts and audio: Sergey Lavrov encourages Hungarian foreign minister Péter Szijjártó to blackmail the EU Council over Ukraine, then asks him to pass along EU documents. It’s hard to say which part is worse.

Trump Jr & Brad Pascale have arrived in Bosnia to meet w/ Milorad Dodik’s Russian-backed secessionist regime. Dodik, a long time Serb militant & Bosnian Genocide denier, secured US sanctions relief in Oct after hiring Blagojevich & Mike Flynn as lobbyists. www.klix.ba/vijesti/bih/...

Could someone stop this genocidal madman pls? edition.cnn.com/2026/04/06/w...

An important announcement. A registration link for non-presenting audience members and friends of RUTA will be coming soon

Programming our next conference of the RUTA Association for Central, South-Eastern, & Eastern European, Baltic, Caucasus, Central, & Northern Asian Studies in Global Conversation. Once again I’m in awe of the incredibly re‑imaginative proposals we receive, because we welcome them. It gives one hope!

A new podcast, Balkanomnicon–an international affairs podcast with a focus on the Balkans-that will be of interest to our RUTA communities

An insightful thread about Georgian resistance against authoritarianism

A conversation not to miss. It is always so immensely insightful and meaningful to hear Rita Adel, who comes from a Palestinian-Ukrainian family. She spoke at our RUTA conference in Ukraine last year and it was one of the most powerful panels in a completely packed room

A telling exchange. "Beyond easily demonstrable untruths about Ukraine, what’s unfortunate about Slezkine’s historical analysis is its failure to ponder cause and effect, even at a superficial level." www.nybooks.com/articles/202...

A free online course that will be of interest to our RUTA communities

Wonderful news. This book is a crucial read that tells on what it takes to overthrow a dictatorship and honours the efforts of those who try, even when success isn’t linear or instant and can take generations. There might soon be a symposium published about the book and several revolutionary Springs