Within a year of Russia’s February 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Ukraine’s Institute for Soil Science and Agrochemistry Research assessed that at least 10.5 million hectares, or a quarter, of the country’s agricultural land had been degraded by the war. Subjected to damage from bombs and artillery, compaction from heavy military vehicles, and chemical contamination from explosives and fuel spills, Ukraine’s soils will require what Maria Puig de la Bellacasa (2019) refers to as long-term “ecological cultures of care” to heal. Approaching soil through the lens of both visual and elemental media, this talk considers how the liveliness and wounding of soil ecosystems is represented amidst the ongoing war from the tank-stopping agency of the “rasputitsa” (mud season) to the cascading impacts of the invasion on the food system in Ukraine and abroad. Arguing that Russia’s war on Ukraine is, in part, an agricultural war, the talk will explore how the battlescape’s highly mediated soil grounds the entangled visual and temporal politics of the war—soil hosts its destructive capacity and also distinctive timescales of repair and regrowth.
Zenia Kish is Assistant Professor of Communication and Digital Media Studies at Ontario Tech University. Her work on global digital media, food politics, digital agriculture, and philanthropy has been published journals including American Quarterly, Cultural Studies, New Media & Society, and Antipode (forthcoming). Her co-edited anthology Food Instagram: Identity, Influence, and Negotiation recently won the 2023 Best Edited Volume Prize from the Association for the Study of Food and Society.