Vlada Vazheyevskyy

Vlada Vazheyevskyy is a Ukrainian PhD researcher in the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of St Andrews and a Visiting Doctoral Researcher at the Estonian Academy of Arts for the 2026/7 academic year. They are a part of the artist-researcher collective Occupational Formations which documents the (in)visible infrastructures facilitating the Russian occupation of Ukraine. Their collective project Occupational Formations: Infrastructures of the Seen and Unseen has been funded by the Documenting Ukraine grant of the Institute of Human Sciences in Vienna and is currently being prepared to be shown at the upcoming Transmediale 2027 Festival. 

In my doctoral research I broadly attend to the Ukrainian migration to Estonia, working with both: diasporic Ukrainians who arrived or were sent to the country to labour in one of its industries during the period of Soviet occupation, and the newly displaced Ukrainians who've arrived to Estonia since the full-scale invasion of Russia into Ukraine. I examine the ways in which these heterogenous diasporic and displaced communities contest, rethink and relate to the remains of Soviet industrial heritage and infrastructure in their environment, and attend to how they continue to navigate the process of integrating into Estonian society, focusing on the issues of language and access to the labour market. 

I give particular ethnographic attention to the ways in which Ukrainian communities in Sillamäe and Narva, two cities in the Ida-Viruma region of Estonia which borders Russia, memorialise the histories of forced labour in their environment. 

In my previous scholarship I have looked at how people from the temporarily occupied territories of Ukraine who have settled in Scotland since the beginning of the Russian full-scale invasion relate to visual material which escapes the occupied regions through Ukrainian and Russian media infrastructures. I have written about this and more in the text Schrödinger's Flat and the Politics of Seeing.