GCSC KNL | Prof. Dr. Steven Seegel: Map Sensory Overload: Digital Archive Responsibility and Russia’s War Against Ukraine

For a digitally activist Ukraine, the February 24^th Archive is a polyphonic treasure trove of global solidarity and resistance. My archive bridges six main groups: (1) professionally trained field experts in Ukrainian Studies; (2) interested nonspecialists in and beyond academe; (3) leading journalists; (4) OSINT amateurs and mapmakers, who catalogue war crimes and build cases with evidence for criminal prosecution; (5) diplomats and policymakers; and (6) most crucially, a voting citizenry that crosses ideological lines, hoping to raise literacy against malignant disinformation. While social media divides and polarizes, I will introduce strategies on how I have based my rolling public war archive in the working commons.

// Prof. Dr. Steven Seegel is Professor of Slavic and Eurasian Studies at The University of Texas at Austin. He is the author of Map Men: Transnational Lives and Deaths of Geographers in the Making of East Central Europe (University of Chicago Press, 2018), Ukraine under Western Eyes (Harvard University Press, 2013), and Mapping Europe's Borderlands: Russian Cartography in the Age of Empire (University of Chicago Press, 2012). He has been a contributor to Chicago's international history of cartography series and has translated over 300 entries from Russian and Polish for the US Holocaust Memorial Museum's Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, 1933-1945, in multiple volumes, published jointly by USHMM and Indiana University Press. Professor Seegel is a former director at Harvard University of the Ukrainian Research Institute's summer exchange program. You can find him active as the host of author-feature podcast interviews on the popular New Books Network. He is the founder of The February 24th Archive, a community-driven, public-facing digital project (follow @steven_seegel on Twitter/X) with 25GBs of tweets, 1000s of threads, and an average of 20 to 30 million people per month in terms of audience reach, with a focus on building global solidarities during Russia's ongoing full-scale war against Ukraine.    

Prof. Dr. Steven Seegel has been awarded the Vega Medal of 2024 by the Swedish Society for Anthropology and Geography (SSAG) for his scientific contributions to Human Geography. He will receive the medal from King Carl XVI Gustav of Sweden on 22 April.

In cooperation with the Herder-Institut & the East European History department, JLU