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Verschlagwortet: Eastern Europe

Ukrainian Migrants’ Digital Connections to Family and Homeland during the War

By Taisiia Ratushna. Social media and digital platforms have considerably facilitated access to information for Ukrainian migrants. They actively use messengers and thematic groups to keep in touch with relatives, receive news, and discuss issues related to migration and integration in a new environment. Constantly monitoring news on social media allows Ukrainian migrants not only to stay informed about events in the country but also to maintain an emotional connection with home. However, constant engagement with Ukrainian news and communities may slow integration into host societies, as it reinforces emotional ties to their homeland.

Why Ukrainians Return: Motivations of Return Migration and its Implications

By Alexander Sicheneder. The decision to return for many Ukrainians is driven by a combination of emotional-political, social, and economic factors. To fully harness the potential of its diaspora for post-war recovery, Ukraine must adopt a holistic approach that addresses the economic and social needs of its returnees while cultivating a shared sense of purpose in the country’s reconstruction efforts. By doing so, Ukraine can turn the tragedy of displacement into an opportunity for renewal and growth.

Living in War: Why Ukrainian Women are Willing to Live in a Country With a Risk to their Lives

By Natalia Zaitseva-Chipak. Since the beginning of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, European countries have become home to millions of Ukrainians who have been forced to migrate because of the war. Some countries, in particular Germany, have launched unprecedented support and social protection programmes for internally displaced persons, offering housing, social benefits, language courses. Yet, a significant number of Ukrainian women choose to live in Ukraine. Some of them become internally displaced, while others live (and even return from abroad) in the frontline regions, which are constantly hit by missiles and drones.

Enduring Through Liminality: Across and Beyond the Borders of Eastern Europe in the Wartime

By Julia Buyskykh. For decades, anthropologists have been studying borders and borderlands, concentrating on marginalised groups (whether minorities, migrants, or refugees), cross-border state relations, border shadow economies, and the multiple identities of populations settling along borders, whose silenced voices often contradict official state narratives of history, identities, and religion. In this article, the author reflects upon her own experience, entangling it with current anthropological scholarship, exploring the tragic semantics of being displaced and misplaced.

“Developing Ukrainian Studies” – Reflections and Impressions

In this report, Elen Budinova shares some reflections and impressions regarding the conference “Developing Ukrainian Studies: Ukraine in Research and Teaching in the Subjects Slavic Literary and Cultural Studies, Slavic Linguistics in Dialogue with East European History”, which took place in the Dornburg Old Palace from October 12 to 13, 2023. The conference was organized by the research network project “European Times” (EUTIM), the Aleksander Brückner Center for Polish Studies, and the Network for Ukrainian Studies.

The Anticolonial Solidarity Campaign of 1962 in the Hungarian Countryside: An Attempt to Make Global Connections

By Réka Krizmanics. This article discusses a case study of an anticolonial solidarity campaign in the Hungarian countryside based on the archival records of the Hungarian Women’s National Council (HWNC), focusing on spaces and protagonists that are rarely centered in similar investigations. By expanding on this example, it seeks to demonstrate some of the difficulties that arose for women in their practical work that underpinned an important anticolonial initiative.

Avtoportreti Zghvarze: A Film Essay on Memory, Hope and the Search for One’s Identity

Anna Dziapshipa’s essay film “Self-Portrait Along the Borderline” (2023) was screened as part of the Georgian Film Series at the Ukrainian Film Festival (UFF) in Berlin. In the film, Dziapshipa uses her family archive to reconstruct an intimate portrait of her Georgian-Abkhazian family and to reflect on broader issues of identity and memory in the context of war. A review by Ekaterina Grineva.

Retrospective as a New Perspective: An Insight into the 4th Ukrainian Film Festival Berlin

With this year’s motto No Time Like Home (Дім в часі in Ukrainian), the fourth edition of the Ukrainian Film Festival Berlin took place from the 25th to 29th October. Having screened a total of 19 short films, ten recent full-length films and three additional films in the Retrospective programme, as well as three recent Georgian films, across five different cinemas, the festival proved to be a growing success in Berlin’s cultural landscape. A review by Oleksii Isakov.

Politics of Distorted Numbers: How Russia is Counting Displaced Ukrainians and Why?

By Lidia Kuzemska. The scales of displacement and return have symbolical meanings for state actors, either of political failure (massive outflow of population) or political success (high number of returns). In the case of forced displacement of Ukrainians to Russia, the inflated and unverified number of border crossings between Ukraine and Russia, moreover, provided only by the Russian side, mistakenly transformed into a number of supposedly real individual Ukrainians fleeing the Russian invasion in the direction of the aggressor state.

“It was precisely the total absence of reports on the situation on the ground that attracted my attention” – 5in10 with Aleksandra Ancite-Jepifánova

Aleksandra Ancite-Jepifánova is a researcher in European and comparative migration and asylum law. Her academic interests currently concentrate on two broad areas: family migration and access to international protection. She is currently a visiting researcher at the Amsterdam Centre for Migration and Refugee Law. Her research project aims to provide a comparative analysis of Latvian, Lithuanian and Polish responses to the situation at the EU’s border with Belarus, focusing on access to the asylum procedure and compliance with the Rule of Law.