Talking Things with Victoria Donovan and Darya Tsymbalyuk

How do we deny things agency and authority when we master them in an academic narrative? How can we allow them to speak back rather than be passive subjects of enquiry?

Drawing on experiences at the Donbas Studies Summer School in Ukraine in 2019, and specifically their encounters there with coal, Victoria and Darya (Modern Languages) will explore how non-human subjectivities can be brought into research in collaborative ways.

Talking Things is an interdisciplinary seminar about material culture, bringing together scholars from a range of Schools who work on material objects. We meet twice per semester and try to do so in the presence of the things about which we talk.