This project examines how societies living with irreversible harm – from war devastation to ecological degradation – mobilise mourning and hope. The project understands reparation as an embodied cultural practice: a way the subject metabolises damage that cannot be undone, mourns for the losses that could not be recovered – and sustains hope. As borrowed from Ernst Bloch, the idea of hope evokes the complementary concept of rehabilitation, in which the subject obtains new abilities that could transcend impossible repairs. Building on cultural history, memory studies, and environmental humanities, Alexander Etkind investigates how embodied experiences of violence, displacement, and loss generate distinctive repertoires of reparation and rehabilitation. Placing emphasis on irreversible damage – war ruins, petrochemical contamination, scorched or deindustrialised terrains – the project seeks to articulate a theory of “embodied retakes”, in which mourning and hope function as dynamic, mutually reinforcing responses to irreversible loss. Anchored in the annual theme “Bodies”, the project foregrounds how harm becomes legible through bodies – workers exposed to industrial toxicity, civilians surviving the war, communities inhabiting polluted landscapes, and non-human bodies suffering ecological collapse. Drawing on case studies from Eastern Europe and Scandinavia, it analyses how bodies and artefacts become sites of memory, mourning, and hope.
PROF. DR. ALEXANDER ETKIND
CURRICULUM VITAE
Alexander Etkind defended his PhD in Russian cultural history in Helsinki (1998) and has supervised more than thirty PhD students in Europe. He has been a professor at the Central European University in Vienna, where he founded the Open Society Hub for Politics of Anthropocene (2022–2026); at the European University Institute at Florence (2013–2022); and at Cambridge University, where he was also a fellow of King’s College (2004–2013). He is the author of many books on cultural and intellectual history, most recently Nature’s Evil: A Cultural History of Natural Resources (Polity Press, 2021) and Russia Against Modernity (Polity Press, 2023, now available in ten languages, including German and Ukrainian). His current interests are climate politics, comparative history of empires, colonialism and decolonization in Eastern Europe, and critical theory of revanchism.