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Required for HUSI scholarship recipients. Open to the public.
Marta Dyczok, Andriy Kulykov, and Oksana Smerechuk
Abstract
Ukraine Calling was an interview-based podcast hosted by Marta Dyczok on Hromadske Radio from 2016 to 2019. Covering current topics ranging from Ukraine and NATO, press freedom, history and memory, the war in Donbas, and President Volodymyr Zelensky’s landslide election victory in 2019, the podcast is a collection of snapshots of contemporary Ukraine. Guests included policy makers, entrepreneurs, cultural figures, and many others, including Canada’s former Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland, writer Andrey Kurkov, Crimean political prisoner Hennadii Afanasiev, UNHCR’s Pablo Mateu, and ethnologist Ihor Poshyvailo.
Dyczok’s book, Ukraine Calling: A Kaleidescope from Hromadske Radio 2016-2019, collects many of these interviews in one volume to capture pivotal moments in Ukraine as they were happening, representing a version of the country that often gets lost in a world of information overload.
This event will feature Marta Dyczok, creator and host of the Ukraine Calling podcast; Andriy Kulykov, Chairperson of Hromadske Radio; and Oksana Smerechuk, another host of Ukraine Calling.
About the Speakers
Marta Dyczok is Associate Professor at the Departments of History and Political Science, Western University; Fellow at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs; and Adjunct Professor at the National University of the Kyiv Mohyla Academy. Her books include Ukraine’s Euromaidan. Broadcasting through Information Wars with Hromadske Radio (E-IR 2016); Ukraine Twenty Years After Independence: Assessments, Perspectives, Challenges (Aracne editrice 2015); Media, Democracy and Freedom. The Post-Communist Experience (Peter Lang 2009); and The Grand Alliance and Ukrainian Refugees (Palgrave Macmillan 2000). Her articles have been published in, among others, Europe-Asia Studies, Demokratizatsiya, and Canadian Slavonic Papers. Her doctorate is from Oxford University. She researches mass media, memory, migration, and history, and regularly provides media commentary.
Andriy Kulykov has more than 40 years of experience in journalism and propaganda (the latter, during the first 7-8 years of his career in Soviet times). After working in different positions in print and television, since 2016 Kulykov has fully dedicated himself to Hromadske Radio, which he founded in 2013 with a small group of colleagues. Apart from covering social, political, and historical topics, Kulykov is the author of a radio show on Ukrainian rock music which has been on air for more than ten years. In the late 1980s he was among the founders of the Ukrainian Language Society and a delegate to the Founding Congress of the Narodny Rukh (People's Movement of Ukraine). He is a lecturer in Journalism at the Mariupol State University in the East of Ukraine and Head of the Journalism Ethics Commission, an all-Ukrainian NGO.
Oksana Smerechuk graduated in Linguistics from University of Sydney (Australia). She was a researcher and fixer for CBC News and BBC Newsnight in Moscow in the last years of the USSR. Smerechuk then pioneered Head of State-level Ukrainian-English interpretation and translation for Canada. An active community organizer while living abroad, she has been President of the International Women's Club of Belgrade (Serbia), and President of the Kyiv Ambassadors' Spouses Association. From 2016-2019 she was a co-host on Hromadske Radio’s show Ukraine Calling. She now lives in Toronto and serves on the Board of the youth empowerment charity Help Us Help.
Moderated by Emily Channell-Justice, Director, Temerty Contemporary Ukraine Program, Harvard University
Co-sponsored by the Temerty Contemporary Ukraine Program.
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Persons with disabilities who wish to request accommodations or who have questions about access, please contact Megan Duncan Smith, HURI Programs Coordinator, at duncansmith@fas.harvard.edu in advance of the session (at least two weeks prior, if possible).
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