Digital resources in the Social Sciences and Humanities OpenEdition Our platforms OpenEdition Books OpenEdition Journals Hypotheses Calenda Libraries OpenEdition Freemium Follow us

Witnesses, Participants and Creators: the Two-Day Workshop “Ukrainian Scholars and Artists at War”

By Olena Sobolieva

In May 2025, the two-day workshop “Ukrainian Scholars and Artists at War” was held at Forum Transregionale Studien in Berlin. Co-organized by the academic website “Ukraine Moderna”, the event created a platform for Ukrainian scientists and artists to reflect on how the war transformed their professional, ethical, and existential horizons.

The event was organized in partnership with several organizations: the Forum Transregionale Studien, the Interdisciplinary Research Network “Prisma Ukraїna – Eastern Europe Research Network”, the academic website “Ukraine Moderna”, the NGO “The Center for Applied Anthropology”, and the European University Institute. By organizing such an event, Lidia Kuzemska, Oksana Ovsiiuk, and Iulia Lashchuk created a platform for Ukrainian scholars and artists to engage with how Russia’s full-scale invasion has impacted their professional, ethical, and existential horizons.

Two women sitting in front of a laptop, a presentation in the background.
Oksana Ovsiiuk and Olena Sobolieva present the project “In the Thunderstorm of War”. © Forum Transregionale Studien

One of the highlights of the workshop was the co-presentation of the project “In the Thunderstorm of War”, an online collection of interviews with professional historians, anthropologists, and ethnologists about war time, co-curated by Oksana Ovsiiuk and Olena Sobolieva. Their goal was not only to capture the experience of wartime among Ukrainian scholars, but also to explore new modes of scholarly responsibility opened up in conditions of rupture. As the project’s author and the editor-in-chief of Ukraina Moderna, Oksana Ovsiiuk, herself emphasized this work is both — academically and publicly — an act of resistance aimed at preserving the truth, scholarly continuity, and the cohesion of an academic community affected by the war and its consequences.

Julia Buyskykh, anthropologist and translator, who translated the lion’s share of the interviews, shared her experience working on this project. Moreover, she kept a diary[i] during the first month of the full-scale invasion, which was later published within the project “In the Thunderstorm of War”.

During the presentation, Julia provided personal perspectives on writing in terms of holding onto the self during a time of uncertainty. She defines translation as an ethical practice of listening—a practice requiring empathy, precision, and watchfulness over the limits of language itself.

A man sitting in front of a laptop, presenting.
Volodymyr Mylko reports on “Duty and Responsibility vs. Service and armiyshchyna: Dilemmas of a Historian in War”. © Forum Transregionale Studien

One of the recurring topics throughout the workshop had been the dual positionality of researchers in times of war, as both witnesses and participants. This hybridity resonated with many of the stories shared on the first day, particularly in the reflections of the historians Volodymyr Mylko and Ihor Zhaloba, who left their academic positions to join the Armed Forces, yet continued to reflect critically on their experiences.

For Mylko, “[t]he primary task is to win”, but “historians, at the very least, should record contemporary events, using, in particular, the method of oral history. Eyewitness testimonies are very important for creating a future archive of the Russian-Ukrainian war.” The urgency to preserve knowledge against destruction echoed throughout numerous testimonies. By writing encyclopedias, recording testimonies, or continuing to teach under siege, the participants emphasized that today, scholarship and research are acts of existential care and resistance.

 

 

A man pointing at a presentation, other participants watching.
Ihor Zhaloba gives a report on “Civil Society in Times of War: Military Aspect”. © Forum Transregionale Studien

In his report, historian Ihor Zhaloba paid special attention to the stages of the formation of civil society in Ukraine and the role it plays in resisting the Russian invasion.

The workshop also brought sharply into focus the decolonization imperative — in both knowledge production and institutional arrangements underpinning Ukrainian and East European studies. The process of decolonization was not only framed in theoretical presentations but also canvassed and highly debated during the roundtables when the participants spoke about the ongoing lingering influence of Russian and Soviet epistemic hegemonies and Ukrainians breaking through these hierarchies from within.

A group of people in a seminar setting.
Roundtable discussion “The Impact of War on Science and Researchers”. © Forum Transregionale Studien

Another roundtable discussion moderated by Viktoriya Sereda led to the topics of feminization in Ukrainian studies, the precariousness of exile academic careers, and the need for long-term support to forced migrant scholars. The discussion of possible strategies for returning to the original profession as rehabilitation and as a way to return to a peaceful life for demobilized scholars took central stage. It is also worth mentioning that even though the war has created unfixable ruptures, new solidarities, infrastructures, and ethical requirements for scholarly practice have increased during this time of uncertainty

Besides the panel on academic witnessing and decolonization, the workshop consisted of a series of presentations emphasizing the diversity of wartime scholarly and artistic reactions. Sociologist Tetiana Kostiuchenko presented the book “Russia’s War in Ukraine 2022: Personal Experiences of Ukrainian Scholars”, which she co-edited with Tamara Martsenyuk and which presented empirical evidence on how scholars have coped with displacement, career disruption, and limitations of instant mobility. She emphasized how war-induced exile is not merely a personal but also a disciplinary disruption which demands new methodology for documenting the fractured lives of researchers.

Four women sitting at a table, listening to a speaker.
Participants discussing the impact of war on scientists and artists. © Forum Transregionale Studien

With a very emotional speech, Khrystyna Semeryn introduced the memorial project “Ukrainian Scientists at War”, devoted to scientists who were killed during the Russian-Ukrainian war. The goal of the project is to preserve each name, every human story, as part of a growing picture of collective memory. By documenting the lives and deaths of Ukrainian researchers, the project honors their work but also defies forgetfulness by asserting that scientific labor is not separate from war, but grotesquely entwined in its wake.

The second day was dedicated to the artistic and cultural consequences of war. Drawing upon her vast experience in cultural diplomacy, Kateryna Rietz-Rakul, Head of the Ukrainian Institute in Germany, emphasized the importance of Ukraine not losing ist presence in the world during the war. She touched upon the question of representing a country under attack and introduced the different programs of the Ukrainian Institute.

Iuliia Lashchuk and Anna Dolinska explored the visibility and the working conditions of Ukrainian female artists in exile, focusing on how artistic work gains meaning in the context of forced displacement and on how cultural producers navigate foreign art markets and institutional gatekeeping. Both artistic exile academic exile share parallels: They are marked by precarity, the need for reinvention, and the dual burden and opportunity of representing a nation at war.

A woman presenting in front of a room of seminar participants.
Alina Potemska presents the role-playing game “In Our Shoes”. © Forum Transregionale Studien

Alina Potemska and Oksana Drachkovska presented projects that blended creative expression with collective memory. Potemska’s live-action role-playing project “In Our Shoes” invites participants to inhabit the emotional spaces of coerced displacement, while Drachkovska’s Visual Diaries of War present the everyday resistance to drawing. These presentations illustrated the pedagogical and affective potential of art in representing wartime conditions across linguistic and cultural divisions.

A woman sitting on a table, presenting to a group.
Oksana Drachkovska gives a report “Visual Diaries of War”. © Forum Transregionale Studien

The day concluded with Anastasiia Shevchenko’s report on “Restore#UACULTURE” and the documentation of the destruction of cultural heritage in southern Ukraine. In her presentation, she revealed that cultural erasure is not an aftereffect of war, but a purposeful component of Russian aggression — not only to devastate infrastructure, but cultural heritage.

These two panels collectively gave the participants a many-sided view of how artists and scholars are still creating, documenting, and resisting — using their areas of study as tools of resilience, testimony, and transformation.

Writing under the pseudonym Marushka, Yuliia Marushko, author and artist, works on personal and collective memory, specifically on the Euromaidan and the war in Ukraine. She presented her short film “Marushka”. Drawing on a diary-inspired visual language that blends with private reflection, her work opens up a space of affective and historical engagement.

A woman sitting on a table, presenting to a group.
Roundtable discussion “Strategies of cultural diplomacy during wartime and afterwards”. © Forum Transregionale Studien

The workshop logically segued into the final roundtable “Strategies of Cultural Diplomacy During Wartime and Afterwards”, which Iuliia Lashchuk moderated. The question on how Ukraine’s cultural sphere engages with diplomacy during war, displacement, and visibility led the workshop into a final joint discussion. The panelists addressed not only short-term strategies of presence and advocasy but also visions for long-term cultural sovereignty of Ukraine and institutional partnerships.

Group photo in the seminar room.
Participants of the workshop „Ukrainian Scholars and Artists at War“. © Forum Transregionale Studien


Notes

[i] https://uamoderna.com/in-the-thunderstorm-of-war/war-notes-the-first-month-of-war/


About the Author

Olena Sobolieva is an historian and anthropologist. She is also head of the NGO “The Center for Applied Anthropology” and a visiting scholar at the Institute of Social Anthropology of the University of Basel. She is co-curator of the project “In the Thunderstorm of War”.


Other recent articles in the TRAFO series Rethinking East European Studies in Times of Upheaval:

Tamara Hundorova, Traumatised Decolonial Transit: Constructing Historical Narrative in Ukrainian Culture in the Early ХХІ Century, 08.07.2025.

Yuliia Koniva, Dichotomy of Methodology Between the American and the French Approach in Frontier/Border Studies: Sloboda-Ukraine in the 18th Century, 19.06.2025.

Svitlana Pidoprygora, Ukraine and Ukrainians in the Panels: Global Comics Perspectives on the War, 10.06.2025.


Citation: Olena Sobolieva, Witnesses, Participants and Creators: the Two-Day Workshop “Ukrainian Scholars and Artists at War”, in: TRAFO – Blog for Transregional Research, 05.08.2025, https://trafo.hypotheses.org/60579


OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Forum Transregionale Studien (August 5, 2025). Witnesses, Participants and Creators: the Two-Day Workshop “Ukrainian Scholars and Artists at War”. TRAFO – Blog for Transregional Research. Retrieved November 7, 2025 from https://doi.org/10.58079/14gks


Forum Transregionale Studien

The Berlin-based Forum Transregionale Studien promotes the internationalization of research in the humanities and social sciences. It provides scope for collaboration among researchers with different regional and disciplinary perspectives and appoints researchers from all over the world as Fellows. More...

You may also like...

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.