Asia Bazdyrieva’s recent research tests the hypothesis that through colonial expansionists projects of both Western European States and the Russian Empire (operating through cartography, texts, images, geological prospecting, etc.) the territories of present-day Ukraine were imaged and imagined as a territory of inexhaustible resources that can feed the entire world. In her presentation, she will talk about resourcification by looking at sociotechnical imaginaries that contribute to the making of a resource through arranging substances, technologies, discourses and practices deployed by different kinds of actors (Richardson 20214). This framework is productive in order to see how Ukraine’s territory and its people are imagined as a component of material exchange, as well as to see how the notion of the territory as a resource justifies a spatial organization that enables slow violence and environmental damage while equating the human population and life at large to geological, agricultural, and other forms of matter with usable material capacities.

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