Registration has closed for this event. Please contact the event planner for more information.

Witnessing the War in Ukraine: Testimony in the Pursuit of Justice

Tue, Aug 27, 2024 - Fri, Aug 30, 2024

Testimony in the Pursuit of Justice

Summer Institute

27-30 August, 2024 - Wrocław, Poland

 

 

As an urgent response to the Russian military aggression against sovereign Ukraine, several partner institutions launched the Summer Institute Witnessing the War in Ukraine in July 2022 and then hosted the Second Institute in June 2023. Over the two years, the circumstances of the war led to the rapid growth of grassroot activism and formation of new research communities both in Ukraine and beyond. As academic researchers, we consider it as our professional and ethical obligation to continue the initiative we introduced two years ago to further disseminate our academic expertise in oral history, ethnography, memory studies, interview research and research of witness literature, as well as to share this knowledge with a broad and evolving community of practitioners working in various local settings.

 

The third Summer Institute in 2024 will focus on testimony research in the pursuit of justice, with an ambition to chart novel disciplinary approaches for oral history, memory studies and anthropology, while affording victims of the war a space of trust, empowerment and dignity.

 

We invite the prospective WWSI 2024 participants to bring to the limelight, contextualize and interrogate injustice as it has been witnessed, observed and experienced, from a variety of conceptual and disciplinary perspectives, across diverse ethnic, religious, and cultural groups of Ukraine. Testimonies provided by eyewitnesses play a pivotal role in uncovering crimes, establishing culpability of war criminals, and securing redress for victims. The first-hand testimonies serve not only as crucial components in legal proceedings but also as a solid basis for upholding human rights and international law during armed conflicts. Moreover, such juridical work with witnesses lays the groundwork for restoring trust in the legal system and fostering peace in post-conflict societies.

 

The concept of genocide is of special interest within the framework of WWSI 2024. Since 2014 the rhetoric of genocide has been tested to provide a juridical qualification of the crimes of the Russian Federation committed in Ukraine. We will discuss existing scholarly approaches and gauge the possibility of qualifying assaults against one’s life, one’s group identity, one’s cultural heritage and one’s natural habitat as crimes of genocide in a comparative perspective. Another focus of WWSI 2024 is proposed to be on experiences of occupation and pursuit of justice in the formerly occupied territories.

 

Over the course of four days, the institute will offer a series of presentations, workshops, and mentorship opportunities examining current trends in scholarly and creative reflections on witnessing the war in Ukraine. Invited speakers and faculty will lead such discussions and invited participants will be offered opportunities to discuss their work with other members of the Institute. Testimonials to the work of the previous Summer Institute can be found here.

 

The Summer Institute will be held in person in Wrocław, Poland. Although, there will be an opportunity to join some sessions online. Links will be published in the online program soon.

The working language of the Institute is English.

Agenda

 

Registration opens

 

Keynote lecture by Dirk Moses "Genocide and Armed Conflict: A Complex Relationship"

Genocide has been alleged many armed conflicts today, ranging from Ukraine to Gaza to Ethiopia. As a word to describe the “destruction of nations,” genocide captures the noting of attacking collective identities better than its rival concept, crimes against humanity. While the same actions can be covered by both concepts, then, genocide is distinguished by its intention. Legally, genocide requires what the international jurisprudence calls “specific intent” (dolus specialis), meaning that the only aim of an attack is to destroy members of a national, racial, ethnic, or religious group “as such”: simply on the grounds of their identity — for who they are, not for anything they may have done or are doing. This intent is distinct from the military necessity that is intrinsic to armed conflict, although genocide often occurs during armed conflict. Genocide is difficult to prove in courts, because military campaigns contain mixtures intentions — like reprisals or excessive destruction as deterrence — and because targeting putatively military targets can have genocidal effects on civilian populations and the nations they constitute. This paper will elaborate these issues with references to current conflicts and legal cases underway in international courts in order to better delineate the issues confronting Ukraine today. While the paper evinces understanding for the recourse to claims of genocide by attacked groups, it asks whether this choice precludes others, and whether attending to the context and causes of armed conflict reveals their deeper logic: the utopian striving for permanent security.

Speaker: Dirk Moses

Moderator: Natalia Khanenko-Friesen

Special event by DUHK, CIUS, UOHA

Dinner

Restaurant STARY KLASZTOR

Address: 1 Purkyniego Street.

Transport from Zajednia: Tram No. 17, 11 stops, exit at Pl. Nowy Targ stop.

Speakers

 

A. Dirk Moses

City College of New York

A. Dirk Moses is the Anne and Bernard Spitzer Professor of International Relations at the City College of New York. Raised in Brisbane, Australia, he was educated at the Universities of Queensland (B.A. 1987), St. Andrews (M.Phil. 1990), Notre Dame (M.A. 1994), and California, Berkeley (Ph.D. 2000). Before coming to City College, he was the Frank Porter Graham Distinguished Professor of Global Human Rights History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill from July 2000 to July 2022. Between 2000-2010 and 2016-2020, he taught at the University of Sydney. He held the Chair of Global and Colonial History at the European University Institute, Florence, from 2011 to 2015. His first book, German Intellectuals and the Nazi Past (2007), was awarded the Clio-Online ‘'Historical Book of the Year'’ prize. Dirk has written extensively in the fields of genocide and memory studies. Recent anthologies include Patriotic History and the (Re)Nationalization of Memory (Routledge 2023) and Decolonization, Self-Determination, and the Rise of Global Human Rights Politics (Cambirdge, 2020). Dirk's latest book, The Problems of Genocide: Permanent Security and the Language of Transgression, appeared in February 2021. Two anthologies appearing this year are The Holocaust Museum and Human Rights (University Pennsylvania Press) and The Russian Invasion of Ukraine: Victims, Perpetrators, Justice, and the Question of Genocide (Routledge). He is senior editor of the Journal of Genocide Research.

Alina Doboszewska

Jagiellonian University; Dobra Wola Foundation

Alina Doboszewska is a researcher at the Institute of Sociology of the Jagiellonian University, NGO activist: founder and president of the Dobra Wola Foundation in Krakow, member of the Polish Oral History Association and Memory Studies Association. She has completed several oral history projects in Poland, Ukraine, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Sweden, and 11 documentary films based on biographical interviews. Her research interests include practical aspects of oral history methodology, forced resettlement after World War II, everyday life in Stalinist times and the movement of Ukrainian dissidents in the 1960−1980s.

Claudia Seymour

Geneva Graduate Institute

Claudia Seymour is an applied social researcher with more than 20 years of experience, working primarily in conflict-affected environments. Her research specialisations include youth, protection, resilience to violence, and the ethics of international engagement. She has extensive experience working with the United Nations and as a research consultant for a range of international NGOs and think tanks, with a focus on sub-Saharan Africa. She is a trainer in protection and human rights and a lecturer and convenor in MA courses on the political economy of violence, conflict management, and the ethics of international engagement. Her current research project, ‘Balancing on the margins: young people’s pathways to engaging with/transforming violence,’ is a comparative interdisciplinary inquiry into how young people cope with and make sense of violence, drawing on mixed methods including ethnography, narratives, and the practice of yoga and pranayama. She is the author of The Myth of International Protection: War and Survival in Congo, published by the University of California Press in 2019. Claudia is a Senior Researcher with the Centre on Conflict, Development and Peacebuilding (Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, Geneva) and a Research Associate at the Department of Development Studies, School of Oriental and African Studies (University of London). 

Eleonora Narvselius

Lund University

Eleonora Narvselius is anthropologist from Lund University, Sweden. Her research interests comprise Ukrainian memory culture, narrative analysis, ethnicity, and nationalism. In the course of her academic career, she has participated in several international research projects focusing on urban environment, memory cultures and cultural heritage of East-Central European borderlands. Among her core publications is Ukrainian Intelligentsia in Post-Soviet L’viv: Narratives, Identity and Power (Lexington Books, 2012).

Gabriele Rosenthal

University of Göttingen

Gabriele Rosenthal is a sociologist and Professor (Emerita) of Qualitative Methodology at Institute of Methods and Methodological Principles in the Social Sciences, University of Göttingen in Germany. She is renowned for her contributions to biographical and generational research, and qualitative methodology, as well as for her studies of the collective and intergenerational effects of the Holocaust and collective violence more generally. Her empirical research first concentrated on the impacts of World Wars I and II, the "Third Reich", the Holocaust and similar crimes in the present. In the context of a research project on outsider and established groupings in Palestine and Israel, she was focused on the perspectives and experiences of Palestinians as members of different groupings and (local) group constellations. In the last 20 years she has done research together with Artur Bogner on violent conflicts and processes of de-escalation in Ghana and Uganda, and on former child soldiers and ex-rebels in northern Uganda. Currently, they are both involved in a research project on the individual and collective recollection of slavery and the slave trade in Ghana and Brazil.

Gelinada Grinchenko

University of Wuppertal; Ukrainian Oral History Association

Gelinada Grinchenko is Philipp Schwartz Fellow at the University of Wuppertal (Germany); Co-Head of Ukrainian Oral History Association; Co-Head of the German-Ukrainian Historians Commission; Editor-in-Chief of the Ukrainian based academic peer-reviewed journal Ukraina Moderna. Her main areas of interest are oral history, the history and memory of WWII, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Memory Studies. She has edited several books and journals, and published many chapters and peer-reviewed articles on these issues. Her latest edited volume is: Listening, Hearing, Understanding: an Oral History of Ukraine in Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries (in Ukrainian), ART-KNYHA, Kyiv, 2021. 

Hasan Hasanović

Srebrenica-Potočari Memorial Centre

Hasan Hasanović is a Srebrenica genocide survivor, a Head of Oral History at the Srebrenica Memorial Center, and an Honorary Research Fellow at the De Montfort University, Leicester, UK. Hasanović is the author of Surviving Srebrenica (2016), which tells his personal story of survival, and he speaks frequently about his experience at academic and commemorative events worldwide. His co-edited book Voices from Srebrenica: Survivor Narratives of the Bosnian Genocide, was published in 2020, and it provides accounts of eyewitnesses of the Srebrenica genocide. Most recently, he headed on behalf of the Memorial Center a joint project by the Center and the War Childhood Museum in Sarajevo, focused on recording stories of children who survived the Srebrenica genocide, as well as the Memorial’s project with BIRN focused on the collection of oral history testimonies of Srebrenica genocide survivors. He holds a degree in Criminal Sciences from the University of Sarajevo, and has given numerous talks nationally and internationally about the Srebrenica genocide and his personal experience.

Jakub Gałęziowski

 Jakub Gałęziowski is a social and oral historian with a focus on the Polish history of the Second World War and its consequences. In 2021, he received a PhD in history from the University of Augsburg and the University of Warsaw for his dissertation about Polish children born of war, recently published as Niedpowiedziane Biografie. Polskie dzieciurodzone z powodu wojny (Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Krytyki Politycznej, 2022). The book has already garnered awards for outstanding works in the humanities issued in Poland in 2022. Currently, he is affiliated with the University of Warsaw, where he teaches oral history and biographical methods. He is the author of numerous articles in these research fields as well as in social history. He is a co-founder and president (2022–2025) of the Polish Oral History Association and a council member of the International Oral History Association (2023–2025). He is an editor of “Wrocławski Rocznik Historii Mówionej” and affiliated with “The Children Born of War Project” as the Central and Eastern Europe specialist.

Józef Markiewicz

POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews

Józef Markiewicz is an anthropologist and museologist, currently works as a Senior Oral History Specialist at the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw, where he supervises the implementation of research projects documenting the fate of Polish Jews from an individual perspective. A graduate of the Institute of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Warsaw, he also studied at the Department of Ukrainian Philology at the University of Warsaw; has experience in ethnographic field research in the Lviv region and the Polish-Ukrainian borderland (transnational labor migrations in the context of national-state identity discourse; economic, cultural, and symbolic aspects of the Polish-Ukrainian border, social memory). Participant and coordinator of research projects based on oral history method on Eastern borderlands of European Union: Ukraine, Moldova, Russian Federation (e. g “White Karelian remembrance about postwar climate changes”, “Jewish and Roma memory of Transnistria”). Currently he is coordinating a visual ethnography project, documenting the last direct witnesses of the Warsaw Ghetto. Starting from May 2022, he is overseeing the development of the conceptual and documentary work of an oral history project based on personal narratives of Jewish refugees from Ukraine, as well aid-providers in Poland within POLIN Museum oral history program.

Kristina Hook

Kennesaw State University’s School of Conflict Management, Peacebuilding, and Development

Kristina Hook is an Assistant Professor of Conflict Management at Kennesaw State University’s School of Conflict Management, Peacebuilding, and Development. A specialist in Ukraine and Russia, her expertise includes genocide and mass atrocity prevention, emerging technologies and disinformation, post-conflict reconstruction, and war-related environmental degradation. She regularly consults with government, multilateral, and human rights organizations on these issues. Prior to her time in academia, she served as a U.S. Department of State policy advisor for conflict stabilization and in leadership roles with several non-governmental organizations (NGOs).

Natalia Khanenko-Friesen

Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, University of Alberta

Natalia Khanenko-Friesen is an oral historian and cultural anthropologist currently serving in the roles of the director of the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies and Huculak Chair in Ukrainian Culture and Ethnography, both in the Faculty of Arts, University of Alberta, Canada. Her research interests include oral history, vernacular culture, diasporic and ethnic identities, labor migration, and immigrant letter writing. She authored or (co)edited the following books monographs, "Ukrainian Otherlands: Diaspora, Homeland and Folk Imagination in the 20th Century (U of Wisconsin Press, 2015); "The other world, or ethnicity in action: Canadian Ukrainianness at the end of the 20th century" (Smoloskyp Press, 2011); "Orality and Literacy: Reflections Across Disciplines" (U of Toronto Press, 2011) and "Reclaiming the Personal: Oral History in Post-Socialist Europe" (U of Toronto Press, 2015). Dr. Khanenko-Friesen is the founding editor of Canada's scholarly journal Engaged Scholar Journal: Community-Engaged Research, Teaching and Learning. Her current book project has the working title “Decollectivized: The Last Generation of Soviet Farmers Speak Out." Since February 24, 2022, she coordinates a number of scholarly initiatives focusing on war testimony research, including hosting the summer oral history institute "Witnessing the War in Ukraine," Krakow, Poland.

Nataliya Zubar

Maidan Monitoring Information Centre

Nataliya Zubar is a Ukrainian IT professional, human rights activist, journalist, war reporter, videographer. MD in Physics. Print media journalist and software engineer since 1982. Online media editor since 2000 at the website Maidan.org.ua that was a cradle of citizen journalism in Ukraine. Coordinator of online awareness campaigns since 2006. Verified Certificates on Social Network Analysis and Medical Neuroscience from Coursera. Chair of an international NGO Maidan Monitoring Information Center that focuses on information security, countering Russian information war and documenting Russian war crimes in Ukraine. Since March 2022, she and her team have been documenting war crimes committed by the Russian Federation in Kharkiv and the region.

 

Oksana Dovgopolova

Odessa I.I. Mechnikov National University; Past / Future / Art memory culture platform

Oksana Dovgopolova, PhD in Philosophy of History, professor of the Philosophy Department, Odessa I.I. Mechnikov National University, co-curator of Past / Future / Art memory culture platform. The main areas of research interests: social reconciliation in the context of collective memory, Odesa image in “memory entrepreneurship”, the development of Odesa regional identity in time of russia full-scale invasion. From 2014 curates the projects of public history with the focus on social reconciliation. In 2019, together with Kateryna Semenyuk, she founded the Past / Future / Art project which implements educational and research projects, as well as a public program of activities to involve the wide audience into working through the past. Launched the development of the Glossary of Memory Studies for Past / Future / Art website. Co-organizer of the Laboratory of Artistic Research of War Experiences “Land to Return, Land to Care” (2022) and the Laboratory of Memorial Practices in Ukraine (2024). Co-curator of the Art exhibitions “From 1914 till Ukraine” in Kunstmuseum Stuttgart (2023), “Ground Shadows” in Kazerne Dossin Memorial Center (2023), “Mikki-Mouse Steppe” in Odesa National Fine Art Museum (2024) etc. In 2024 co-curates the Ukrainian pavilion “From South to North” at the first Malta Biennale of Contemporary Art.

Yevheniia Podobna

Journalist & Documentarian

Yevheniia Podobna is Ukrainian journalist, documentarian, writer and scholar, Candidate of Sciences in Social Communications. In addition to journalistic work, in different years she worked on collecting memories of prisoners of Nazi concentration camps (Auschwitz and Dachau, 2012), witnesses of the accident at the Chornobyl nuclear power plant, and resettled residents of the exclusion zone (2016-2018, 2021). Since 2014, she has been working with the topic of the war in Ukraine, from 2015 to 2018 – with war correspondent on the front line. Since 2019, she has been working in military documentaries and journalism. Yevheniia Podobna is the author of six books and eight documentaries. Books: "Girls Cut Braids" (2018, a collection of stories of military women), "Fierce February 2022" (2022, a collection of testimonies about the first days of the full-scale invasion), "Cities of the Living, Cities of the Dead" (2022, stories and reports from the war in Bucha and Irpin), “Heroic cities of Bucha, Irpin, Hostomel” (2023, stories and reports from the war in Bucha, Irpin, and Hostomel), "Okhtyrka Outpost" (2023, a mosaic of stories about the defense of the city in Sumy Oblast), "Her War" (2023, collection of stories of women of war). After the full-scale invasion, she focuses on recording stories, memories and testimonies, works on memorial website-archive of the war in Bucha and Irpin and continue publishing books about the Russian-Ukrainian war based on the eyewitnesses' memories. During 2023, she shot two documentaries: "Visible Enemy" (memoirs of the Russian occupation of the Chornobyl Exclusion Zone) and "Hostomel. The first battle" (about the failure of the assault on the Antonov airfield in Gostomel on February 24, 2022, which broke the Russian plan to attack Kyiv).

Organizers and Partners

 

Alberta Society for the Advancement of Ukrainian Studies
Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, University of Alberta
Centrum Historii Zajezdnia
Dobra Wola Foundation
Kule Folklore Centre, University of Alberta
Kule Institute for Advanced Study, University of Alberta
Lund University
National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy
Polish Oral History Association
Society of Friends of the Ukrainian Folklore Centre
Ukrainian-German Historical Commission
Ukrainian Oral History Association
University of Alberta

Location details

 

Address: Centrum Historii Zajezdnia, Grabiszyńska 184, 53-235 Wrocław, Poland

Registration is closed
Already Registered?