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Category: Prisma Ukraïna

Two girls are sitting on a wooden bench in the park. One is looking at the camera, both are wearing jeans and sleeveless tops.

Fragmented Lives / Prisma Ukraïna

Ukrainian Youth in Denmark: Growing Up and Working Amid Forced Migration

By Nataliia Varha and Kathrine Vitus. Ukrainian youth who have experienced a full-scale war and who have found themselves in situations of forced migration undergo the process of growing up at an accelerated pace, often without the usual support systems – family, home, stability. Their transition to adulthood occurs in new cultural, economic, and social environments where personal choice, adaptability, and self-reliance become critically important. The project “The Transitions of Displaced Ukrainian Youth – A Qualitative Longitudinal Study” examined their adaptation strategies and transitions into adulthood.

Street art of two birds with text reading "Stop war in Ukraine".

Prisma Ukraïna / War, Migration and Memory

“Russia is Unequivocally a ‘Cannibal Country’”: How Ukrainian Officials Talk About the ‘Russian World’

By Liudmyla Pidkuimukha. What is the ‘Russian World’ – russkij mir – and how is it understood today from a Ukrainian perspective? Officially, this doctrine is built on a mix of shared language, culture, Orthodox Christianity, historical memory, and reverence for the so-called ‘Great Patriotic War’, often framed as the Soviet Union’s greatest victory. In Ukraine, this ideology has taken on a very different meaning in the shadow of the full-scale Russo-Ukrainian war. Ukrainian officials draw on powerful imagery to make sense of violence, occupation, and loss – and to challenge the narratives coming from Moscow.

Drawing of Putin.

Prisma Ukraïna / Rethinking East European Studies in Times of Upheaval

Dismantling Matter: Ukraine’s Attempts to Decolonize its Culture

By Nadiia Honcharenko. In Ukraine, there has been a strong public demand that certain elements of heritage should be removed from public space, as they contain distinct symbols of colonial and totalitarian domination and therefore aggravate the sense of trauma that Ukrainians are currently experiencing, as well as increase the pain of grief and loss caused by Russian aggression. This demand can be seen as both, reason and result of Ukraine’s struggle to reject the false and deeply violent so-called ‘brotherhood’ between Ukrainian and Russian society. Two main trends are evident: The desire of Ukrainians to free themselves from Russian shackles on one side and the attempts of the Russian political regime to slow this desire down, or even prevent it, on the other side.

Prisma Ukraïna / Rethinking East European Studies in Times of Upheaval

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. 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.

Prisma Ukraïna / Rethinking East European Studies in Times of Upheaval

Traumatised Decolonial Transit: Constructing Historical Narrative in Ukrainian Culture in the Early ХХІ Century

By Tamara Hundorova. The Orange Maidan was a form of consolidation of the national community and had distinct signs of anti-colonial protest, but it ended in significant disappointment. The period between the two Maidans, or the two Ukrainian revolutions of the early twenty-first century, revealed past traumas and recorded different models of historical memory, primarily national–Eurocentric and nostalgic–Soviet–centric. The time has come to build historiographical narratives out of fragments, films, and paintings, out of the remnants of the memory erased by the era of colonialism and totalitarianism.

Prisma Ukraïna / Rethinking East European Studies in Times of Upheaval

Травмований деколоніальний транзит: конструювання історичного наративу в українській культурі на початку ХХІ століття

від Тамара Гундорова. Помаранчевий майдан був формою консолідації національної спільноти і мав виразні ознаки атиколоніального протесту, який однак закінчився значними розчаруваннями. Період між двома Майданами, або двома українськими революціями початку ХХІ століття, проявив минулі травми і зафіксував різні моделі історичної пам’яті, передусім націо-євроцентричну і ностальгійно-радяноцентричну. Прийшов час розбудови історіографічних наративів із фрагментів, плівок і картин, із залишків стертої епохою колоніалізму і тоталітаризму пам’яті.

Issues / Prisma Ukraïna

Are we all Migrants? Masterclass with Highschool Students and Prisma Ukraїna

By Marko Duric and Diana Rubezhanska. On Wednesday, 30 April 2025, students of Walther-Rathenau-Gymnasium visited the Forum Transregionale Studien for the second time for a workshop on the topic of displacement in the context of Russia’s War against Ukraine. In the Displacement Masterclass, conducted by Prisma Ukraїna Fellows Viktoriya Sereda and Lidia Kuzemska, the students learned about the Forum Transregionale Studien’s Prisma Ukraїna: War, Migration and Memory project, an interdisciplinary research group of Ukrainian scholars in Ukraine and Germany that has been constituted in 2022 under the direction of Viktoriya Sereda. The research group offers a multi-scalar perspective on the transformational effects of war and dislocation on people’s memory, history, and sense of belonging. Since 2016, the Forum cooperates with the nearby Walther-Rathenau-Gymnasium and arranges encounters of students and Fellows on issues of common concern.

Prisma Ukraïna / Rethinking East European Studies in Times of Upheaval

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

By Yuliia Koniva. Historical geography as an interdisciplinary discipline offers many of the conceptions for studying space and territory. In this essay, I want to address that there is no common ground on how to apply these conceptions. In every national historiography we can find plenty of historians who utilize the approaches of studying space or territory according to the research goals which were put forward in front of each scholar.

Prisma Ukraïna / Rethinking East European Studies in Times of Upheaval

Liminality and Museums in Ukraine: the Khanenkos’ Case

In this essay, I apply “liminality”—linked to the idea of a specific contact zone characterized by ambiguity, high potential to hybridization of identities and subversion of authority—to examine the case of Bohdan and Varvara Khanenko. The Khanenkos were prominent collectors of Ukrainian cultural heritage and the founders of the first public museums in Kyiv in the late 19th and early 20th century. Mentally shaped by the empire(s), the Khanenkos started acting on both sides of the colonial divide since the 1890s: At the Russian court, they played impeccably loyal subjects. Simultaneously, in Kyiv, they converted the empire’s trust into a new freedom of action enabling grand, future-oriented cultural changes.

Prisma Ukraïna / Rethinking East European Studies in Times of Upheaval

‘Fight your Emotions’: Affective Injustice in Wartime

By Olena Komar. Although research on affective injustice is gaining ground, no attention has yet been paid to wartime experiences. War has many destructive and devastating consequences, but against the backdrop of the physical damage it causes, other detrimental effects are muted, shadowed, and hardly noticeable. What is perceived as aggression and anger, a manifestation of temperament or trauma, is a legitimate assertion by Ukrainians of their right to identity, which is a condition for survival in a genocidal war, as well as to cultural identity instead of the imperial dissolution of colonized peoples. It is the right to have their voices understood, not just “heard.”