Seminar series “Witnessing Studies and Knowledge Production: Ukraine in Focus”
Since Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, testimony, oral history, and witnessing have become central to documenting, interpreting, and understanding the ongoing war. At the same time, the rapid expansion of interviews, archives, artistic practices, and public memory initiatives has transformed witnessing into a cutting-edge area of contemporary scholarship. Beyond documenting individual experiences, witnessing has increasingly become a means of producing knowledge about war, violence, displacement, survival, and social transformation.
The seminar series Witnessing Studies and Knowledge Production: Ukraine in Focus provides an international forum for examining witnessing both as a research practice and as an area of study emerging at the crossroads of memory studies, oral history, anthropology, history, cultural studies, sociology, literary studies, museum studies, archival studies, and related fields. The series seeks to formulate the conceptual framework for witnessing studies while placing the Ukrainian case within broader debates in genocide studies, Indigenous studies, displacement studies, famine studies, and related fields.
The seminar series builds on the Witnessing the War on Ukraine Summer Institute, held annually since 2022. Over four years, the Institute brought together researchers and practitioners to examine the ethical, methodological, and theoretical challenges of documenting war, conducting interviews in situations of ongoing violence, interpreting testimony, preserving wartime narratives, and understanding testimony as cultural heritage. The seminar series constitutes the fifth iteration of the Witnessing the War on Ukraine initiative. While maintaining its intellectual focus, it shifts from the format of an annual Summer Institute to a year-round online programme, creating new opportunities for sustained scholarly exchange and interdisciplinary dialogue.
Rather than approaching witnessing and testimony solely as a historical source, the seminars will consider witnessing as a broader epistemological framework through which knowledge about war is produced, interpreted, archived, circulated, and contested. Particular attention will be given to methodological questions, ethical challenges, interdisciplinary approaches, digital and community archives, public history, and the relationship between witnessing, memory, and knowledge production.
This international seminar series is a joint initiative of the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies (University of Alberta), German Ukrainian Historical Commission, Mykola Haievoi Center for Modern History and Lund University.
The seminar series will convene via Zoom during the 2026-2027 academic year. Each session will feature up to three invited speakers, followed by discussion with participants. Sessions will last 90 minutes, with approximately 40 minutes devoted to presentations and 40 minutes to discussion. The working language of the seminar series is English.
By bringing together scholars, practitioners, archivists, artists, and early-career researchers, the seminar series seeks to strengthen international collaboration in witnessing studies and to contribute to ongoing discussions on how knowledge about war is produced, interpreted, and preserved.
Upcoming Seminars
Save the date for October 8, 2026. More details to follow.
Organizers and Partners
Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, University of Alberta, Canada | | Department of Arts and Cultural Sciences, Lund University, Sweden | German-Ukrainian Historian's Commission | Mykola Haievoi Center for Modern History, Ukrainian Catholic University/Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München.
The convenors of the webinar series are Natalia Khanenko-Friesen, Gelinada Grinchenko, and Eleonora Narvselius.