Thesis Eleven is delighted to share details of the first public event in the inaugural Bauman Memorial Conversations, a new biennial series of public dialogues hosted by the Bauman Institute.

The 2026 Conversations, “Thinking Displacement,” will explore displacement in its human, ecological, and intellectual dimensions. The first conversation will be held online on March 25, 2026.

To register and for more details, please follow the link below.

Conversation 1 – Displaced Ecologies (March 25, 2026)
Speakers: Alice Mah & Darya Tzymbalyuk | Host: Jack Palmer

Displaced Ecologies brings together Alice Mah, author of Red Pockets (Penguin, 2025), and Darya Tsymbalyuk, author of Ecocide in Ukraine (Polity, 2025), for a conversation about the multiple temporalities and geographies of environmental destruction. Although their work emerges from very different contexts, both trace forms of ecological violence that transform places and unsettle the human and non‑human lives embedded within them.

The event explores how sudden, spectacular and intentional forms of destruction – such as the ecocide associated with war – intersect with slower, cumulative and industrially‑produced processes of environmental degradation. By placing these forms of harm in dialogue, Displaced Ecologies opens up questions about the ways they converge in the reconfiguration of place: the contamination of land, water, and air; the displacement of communities; and the reshaping of everyday life amid damaged or vanishing ecologies.

A second thread of the conversation centres on form and voice. Both Red Pockets and Ecocide in Ukraine make innovative use of memoir, autobiography and narrative experimentation to move beyond conventional scholarly writing. In doing so, they illuminate the power of personal narrative to bear witness, to convey affect, to articulate memory, and to render ecological displacement as something lived rather than abstract. This emphasis resonates strongly with the work of Janina Bauman, whose centenary and legacy inspire this series. Her reflections on autobiography, memory and truth offer a meaningful point of departure for thinking about why life writing remains vital for confronting histories of violence, displacement, and loss.