Ruta Annual Conference

For decades, knowledge about the RUTA region(s) has often been produced through external perspectives, particularly those shaped by Western academia and Russian imperial frameworks. These approaches have frequently marginalized local intellectual and cultural traditions, privileging distance, detachment, and supposedly objective forms of expertise over lived experience, relationships, and community knowledge.

At the 2026 RUTA Annual Conference, we invite participants to explore rooted and embodied knowledges as sources of social change and shifts in power. We ask how research, art, and cultural heritage are transformed when they emerge from the places and communities they speak about. What possibilities become visible when lived experience, positionality, and local histories are placed at the center of knowledge production?

These questions are particularly urgent in contexts shaped by authoritarianism, colonialism, war, environmental destruction, and social injustice. We seek to examine the role of rooted knowledges in protecting human life and ecosystems, advancing justice, challenging systems of violence, and fostering meaningful solidarity and action.

We welcome contributions on topics including: rooted and embodied knowledges; emotions and positionality in research, activism, and art; vulnerability and resilience; environmental justice and ecocide; Indigenous perspectives; genocide prevention and transitional justice; antifascism; migration and border violence; labor and socio-economic justice; gender equity; decolonizing and queering knowledge; archives and libraries as sites of resistance; solidarity across regions and disciplines; politically engaged research; countering disinformation; and reparative forms of knowledge.

The conference will take place in July 2026 in Ukraine’s Carpathian Mountains at a venue equipped with air raid shelters. The exact location will be shared with registered participants closer to the event.

Submission deadline: November 15, 2025. Notifications of acceptance will be sent by the end of January 2026.

We welcome individual papers, panels, roundtables, and artistic engagements, with particular encouragement for transregional and globally connected perspectives on the RUTA region(s). A limited number of travel grants will be available for participants without institutional funding.

For enquiries, please contact: conference@ruta-association.org