22.04.2026 : JMCM Book Talk – Adrian Ivakhiv

We are pleased to welcome Dr. Adrian Ivakhiv for a discussion of his edited volume, Terra Invicta: Ukrainian Wartime Reimaginings for a Habitable Earth (2025).

The Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 produced not only military and humanitarian responses but also scholarly and artistic ones from Ukrainians looking to the future of their country.

Terra Invicta is a series of critical and creative articulations of pasts, presents, and possible futures involving humans and the more-than-human world. The authors suggest that Ukraine is caught in an environmental war, waged by a fossil-fuel superpower against people who are prepared to lay down their lives to protect their land. This volume explores the relationship between Ukrainians – a multiethnic and multireligious people with a complicated history – and the Ukrainian land, the zemlia to which they belong. Themes include decoloniality, ecocultural identity, the politics of reconstruction, and artistic responsibility amid a war for national survival. Contributors emphasize the value of reviving multispecies relations with the land, positively transforming multicultural relations with history, and reinvigorating grassroots engagements with the state and society.  

Terra Invicta grapples with the role of artistic expression in the face of war and collective loss and what it means to commit to a place, a land, a territory, in a world set in constant motion.

The book is available open access here.

Date: Wednesday, April 22, 2026

Time: 5:30 PM – 7:00 PM

Location: McGill Arts Building | Room 160 (McGill University)

The book talk will be held in English.  

This event takes place in collaboration with Club Ukrainien de Montréal and is presented as part of the Ukraine: No Filter exhibition programming. The exhibition is open from April 1 to June 30, 2026, at Concordia University, Webster Library | McConnell Building LB-2 |1400 de Maisonneuve Blvd. W.