The Ethnography of the War? Articulating Research Needs in Times of Unfolding Trauma
28 March 2022
The video recording of the panel discussion is available here.
Please join us on April 4, 2022 at noon (Edmonton)/21:00 (Kyiv) for the panel discussion The Ethnography of the War? Articulating Research Needs in Times of Unfolding Trauma. This panel will offer insight into the most pressing questions and challenges that Ukrainian anthropologists, oral historians, ethnographers and folklorists are facing right now while handling so much personal and collective trauma that continues to unfold on such a dramatic scale.
With Putin's assault on Ukraine still unraveling, we have already seen the announcements of interview-based research projects aiming to capture the human experience of the war. Join Drs. Oksana Kis, Maryna Hrymych, and Oksana Kuzmenko for a discussion on the ethics and implications of such 'rapid response' fieldwork during sensitive times, moderated by the Huculak Chair of Ukrainian Culture and Ethnography, Dr. Natalia Khanenko-Friesen. This is the second annual event within the framework of the Anthropology of Ukraine network that was hosted last June, in association with UAlberta's Huculak Chair of Ukrainian Culture and Ethnography and the Kule Folklore Centre.
Participants' bios
Dr. Oksana Kis is a feminist historian and anthropologist, a head of the Department of Social Anthropology and a Leading Research Fellow at the Institute of Ethnology, National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine (in Lviv). Since 2010 she has served as a President of the Ukrainian Association for Research in Women's History. She is also a co-founder and a vice-president of the Ukrainian Oral History Association. In 2018 she was elected to the Scientific Council of the National Research Foundation of Ukraine. She has authored two books, “Zhinka v tradytsiinii ukrainskii kilturi druhoi polovyny 19 – pochatku 20 stolittia” (Lviv, 2008; 2n ed. in 2012) and “Ukrainky v GULAGu: vyzhyty znachyt peremohty” (Lviv, 2017; 2nd revised ed. 2020). Her areas of expertise include Ukrainian women’s history, feminist anthropology, oral history, and gender transformations in post-socialist countries, and her current research focuses on the everyday lives of Ukrainian refugees in the displaced persons camps in post-WWII Europe.
Dr. Maryna Hrymych is a folklorist, anthropologist, writer, and diplomat. She served as a Professor (1996–2006, 2014–2015) and Chair (2003-2006) of Ethnology and Local History Studies at the Kyiv Taras Shevchenko University. From 2008–2010, she was a visiting professor at the University of Alberta, and in 2007, she volunteered as an East-European Collection expert for the Canadian Museum of History. Since 2016, she has served as a diplomat in the Middle East and has worked as an independent researcher. Since 2018, she has collaborated with the National Centre of Folk Culture Ivan Honchar Museum as an academic projects curator. Her main research publications include: “Life under the Piniory: Culture Landscape of the Ukrainian Settlements in Brazil” (2016), “Anthropology of War: Case Study Halychyna Division” (2017), and “Ukrainian Civil Customary Law, end of the 19th – beginning of the 20th Centuries” (2006).
Dr. Oksana Kuzmenko is a philologist and folklorist, and a Leading Research Fellow at The Ethnology Institute National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine. She has authored an illustrated academic collection called “Riflemen Songs” (Lviv, 2005) and two monographs, “Riflemen Songs: Folklorism, Folklorizarion, Folklority” (Lviv, 2009), and “The Drama of Human Existence in Ukrainian Folklore: Conceptual Forms of Expression” (Lviv, 2018). She lives and works in Lviv, and is a member of the International Association for the Humanities, the Folklore Studies Commission of the Shevchenko Scientific Society, and the editorial board of the journal Ethnographic Notebooks. Her research interests include: historical folklore, dynamics of folklore tradition, methods of conceptual analysis of verbal folklore texts, and integral interdisciplinary folklore studies.