UKRAINETT digital seminar 1 (20 June)

1. Interviews Amid the War: “24/02/22, 5 am” Documentation Initiative

A lecture by Natalia Otrishchenko, Sociologist and research fellow at the Center for Urban History in Lviv

Followed by Q&A

Chair: Oleksandra Deineko, NIBR OsloMet, V.N. Karazin Kharkiv National University

At the end of February 2022, the Center for Urban History secured digital collections and turned open premises into a shelter. In early March 2022, together with colleagues from Poland, Luxembourg, and the UK, the Center’s team started discussions about ethically well-grounded and methodologically reasonable emergency collecting and archiving of oral testimonies of Ukrainian refugees, IDPs, and volunteers. These discussions resulted in “24/02/22, 5 am: Testimonies from the War” international documentation initiative. During the next six months we collected over 150 interviews in Ukraine. People from Kyiv, Irpin, Bucha, Kharkiv, Mariupol, Kramatorsk, Kherson, Zaporizhzhia, and numerous other places shared their stories of war everydayness, migration, and building a life in a new place. In my presentation, I focus on the ways how the Center’s team approached interviewing during the war and what were the main decisions we had made in designing this initiative.

Natalia Otrishchenko holds a Ph.D. in sociological methodology and methods from the Institute of Sociology, the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine (2015). In 2019-22, Natalia was an associated researcher at the Center for Contemporary History in Potsdam; in 2022-23, she was a Fulbright Visiting Scholar at the Department of Sociology, Columbia University. Since March 2022, she has led the Ukrainian team within the “24/02/22, 5 am” documentation initiative. Her research interests include qualitative methods, oral history, memory studies, urban sociology, and sociology of expertise.

2. Higher education challenges in the war-torn Ukraine: the case of six Universities

A lecture by Olena Muradyan, Dean of the School of Sociology, Associate professor at Political Sociology Department at V.N. Karazin Kharkiv National University

Followed by Q&A

Chair: Oleksandra Deineko, NIBR OsloMet, V.N. Karazin Kharkiv National University

The presentation will be based on the sociological survey conducted in Ukraine in winter-spring 2023 among higher education stakeholders (employers, students, teachers and advisors, management of HEI) selected in six regions of Ukraine. What are the key challenges that Ukrainian universities experience during the Russia’s full-fledged invasion? How has the war-torn reality transformed the labour market and students expectations? The lecture will shed lights on the role of universities in Ukraine’s rebuilding after the war is ended.

Olena Muradyan is Dean of the School of Sociology, Associate professor at Political Sociology Department at V.N. Karazin Kharkiv National University. During the 2022/23 academic year Olena is a participant of Indiana University Ukraine Nonresidential Scholars Program. Her research focuses on social inequality, gender sociology, social values, political sociology, higher education, urban food policy, international comparative sociological studies.