Hunger as a marker of "normal" life? The last generation of Ukrainian Soviet farmers remembers 1947, and other years of their life
23 November 2020
In 2008-2010, along with my colleagues in Ukraine, I coordinated a large-scale oral history project that was conducted in 11 oblasts and documented in-depth life histories shared by the former collective farmers. The project focused on a 'life story' of a particular generation of rural Ukrainians who, having spent their entire lives in the socialist agricultural system, were abruptly decollectivized in the 1990s. Following 170 in-depth life histories recorded by the project, and focusing in particular on how the villagers remembered the famine of 1947, I discuss in this presentation how the tropes of food, and memories of its shortage, presented in rural narratives frame this generation's understandings of what lives they lived.
WHEN: November 27, 2020, 12 pm
WHERE: Zoom. Please email lynnien@ualberta.ca to RSVP
Natalia Khanenko-Friesen is a professor and Huculak Chair in Ukrainian Culture and Ethnography, Department of Modern Languages and Cultural Studies, and the Director of Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, Faculty of Arts, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada.Her research interests include oral history, postsocialism in Europe and Ukraine, diasporic identities, labour migration and Ukrainian Canadian culture. Her book projects include three co-edited collections of essays on oral history and two monographs, Ukrainian Otherlands: Diaspora, Homeland and Folk Imagination in the 20th Century (University of Wisconsin Press, spring 2015) and The Other World or Ethnicity in Action: Canadian Ukrainianness at the end of the 20th century // Inshyj svit abo etnichist u dii: kanads’ka ukrainskist kintsia 20 stolittia (Smoloskyp Press: Kyiv, Ukraine 2011). Dr. Khanenko-Friesen served as the Prairie Centre for the Ukrainian Heritage Director at the University of Saskatchewan and was a Founding Editor of the Engaged Scholar Journal: Community-Engaged Research, Teaching and Learning, Canada’s prime academic journal on collaborative scholarship of community engagement.