CWC Virtual: The Babushkas of Chernobyl

Director/Producer Holly Morris has spent two decades telling and championing pro-woman stories on the global stage. She is an internationally-known filmmaker, author, and presenter (Adventure Divas, Globe Trekker). Her film The Babushkas of Chernobyl premiered at the Los Angeles Film Festival, where it won the Jury Award for Directing, the first of nearly two dozen awards. The film has now been broadcast in more than twenty-five countries worldwide. The film’s story, based on Morris’s print journalism, concerns a defiant community of women who live inside Ukraine’s radioactive “Exclusion Zone”; this story also forms the basis of her popular TED Talk. Her new film Exposure tells the story of a daring expedition party composed of women from the Arab world and the West, and their recent attempt to reach climate change ground zero: the North Pole.

Sara Pankenier Weld is an Associate Professor of Russian and Chair of the Department of Germanic and Slavic Studies at UCSB, as well as an Affiliate of the Comparative Literature Program. She specializes in Russian literature, comparative literature, and Scandinavian literature, and researches childhood across disciplinary and national boundaries, with a special focus on modernism and avant-garde literature, art, and theory. Her books include Voiceless Vanguard: The Infantilist Aesthetic of the Russian Avant-Garde (2014) and The Ecology of the Russian Avant-Garde Picturebook (2018). Her research continues to treat childhood and modernism, including her current book project on Nabokov and childhood, and also employs comparative approaches to children’s literature and culture, including in the pursuit of new interests in indigeneity and ecocriticism. She is currently working on an article related to temporality and childhood in Svetlana Alexievich’s accounts from Chernobyl and an article on Catherine the Great’s writings for children in transnational context.