Olya Zikrata works at the intersections of sound philosophy, cultural theory, anthropology of sound and media, and political studies. She has recently completed her doctorate in Interdisciplinary Humanities at Concordia University, writing on sonic activism and cultures of resistance that expose situational experiences of Russian authoritarianism, imperialism, colonialism, military aggression, and environmental violence. Her dissertation develops an argument for the sonic operative, an activist condition marked by situated efficality of sonic doings that confirm (ethico-) political obligation.  

Olya’s current research project focuses on the Ukrainian experience of Russian aggression as it extends itself in sound. She studies relational politics defining complicity between the aggressor and violence of its sonic presence and explores the impact of war through forms of sonic relationality in human and more than human populated wartime world. She is interested in the performative politics of Ukrainian sound (all sound, music and more) in a time of war and the ecology of justice seeking and sonically working efforts it generates. Her latest publications include the idiosyncratic essay and audio paper in Seismograf Peer, forthcoming research paper in the Journal of Sonic Studies and chapter in the anthology Terra Invicta: Ukrainian Wartime Reimaginings for a Habitable Earth.