War conditions stimulate researchers to be especially diligent in developing an understanding of the needs and challenges of various groups within the society affected by the military conflict. The participants of this panel will talk about the fieldwork they conducted over the past two years in Ukraine with children and adolescents, teachers, and cultural heritage workers examining how belonging to a particular age or a professional group shapes a person’s experience of war. An Adventure, a Trip, an Everyday Life: How Children Describe the Russo-Ukrainian War (2014 - 2024) Viktoriia Nesterenko, Karazin Kharkiv National University
This presentation is a nuanced study of the way children tell stories about their war experiences and the effect these experiences have on children’s personalities. It also addresses what can be done to support children who live through a military conflict. The Impact of War on the New Ukrainian School: the Hazards and Opportunities of Oral History Methodology in Documenting Youth Aspirations during Wartime Carl Mirra, Adelphi University
This presentation explores how researchers can tackle the ethical challenges of “crisis” oral history. It also examines the strengths and limitations of the use of a constructivist grounded theory coding system for understanding broader analytical categories related to civic values, democratization/agency and resilience among Ukrainian high school students and teachers during the acute phase of Russo-Ukrainian war. Cultural Heritage under Fire: Expert and Activist Narratives of Preservation in the Wartime Iryna Sklokina, Center for Urban History
In my presentation I am going to focus on the oral narratives from different regions of Ukraine focused on two aspects of the wartime experience: physical threat and damage caused by the Russian aggression and rethinking the heritage canon in the light of decommunization, recolonization, and derussification.ABSTRACT: Wars bring drastic changes into people’s lives. Some of them affect everyone, however describing an experience of war as something homogenous would be a mistake that often contributes to stereotypes associated with the images of war survivors. Oral history research is one of the best methodologies that helps scholars tackle these stereotypes allowing people from different backgrounds and with different life paths to tell their stories the way they see them. Creating opportunities for these stories to be recorded, archived, and communicated is not an easy task, however. War conditions impose severe limitations and require careful considerations of possible repercussions both interviewers and interviewees may face due to participating in an oral history project. They also stimulate researchers to be especially diligent in developing an understanding of the needs and challenges of various groups within the society affected by war. The participants of this panel will talk about the fieldwork they conducted over the past two years in Ukraine with children and adolescents, teachers, and cultural heritage workers examining how belonging to a particular age or a professional group shapes a person’s experience of the military conflict.
