Witnessing Studies and Knowledge Production: Ukraine in Focus
Thursday, 8 October 2026
10:00 a.m. MDT (Edmonton) / 12:00 p.m. EDT (Toronto) / 6:00 p.m. CEST (Lund, Warsaw) / 7:00 p.m. EEST (Kyiv)
Speakers: Natalia Khanenko-Friesen, Gelinada Grinchenko and Eleonora Narvselius Moderator: Barbara Törnquist-Plewa
The inaugural seminar of Witnessing Studies and Knowledge Production: Ukraine in Focus will introduce the intellectual trajectory that has led from the Witnessing the War on Ukraine Summer Institutes to the development of Witnessing Studies as an emerging area of interdisciplinary inquiry. Building on the work accomplished through the Summer Institutes, the seminar will position Witnessing Studies in relation to established fields and present the conceptual framework proposed by the seminar series. A central question will be whether Witnessing Studies should be understood as a subfield of Memory Studies, an independent field, or a transversal perspective connecting several established disciplines.
At the centre of the proposed framework is the production and contestation of witnesshood — the processes and conditions through which a person comes to be recognized, or fails to be recognized, as a witness, and through which lived experience acquires the authority and public form of testimony. The discussion will consider how witnessing produces knowledge, while also generating silences and exclusions alongside recognized testimony. The seminar will approach Ukraine as a site of knowledge production, where these processes can be examined in real time as the war continues. It will ask what the Ukrainian experience makes visible that remains less visible in retrospective studies of witnessing, and how the Ukrainian case can contribute to the conceptual development of Witnessing Studies.
The seminar will take place via Zoom on:
Thursday, 8 October 2026
10:00 a.m. MDT (Edmonton) / 12:00 p.m. EDT (Toronto) / 6:00 p.m. CEST (Lund, Warsaw) / 7:00 p.m. EEST (Kyiv)
Moderator:
Barbara Törnquist-Plewa 
Barbara Törnquist-Plewa is Professor of Eastern and Central European Studies at Lund University, Sweden. Her main research interests include cultural memory, heritage, identity, nationalism, and the politics of memory in Central and Eastern Europe, with particular attention to Poland, Belarus, and Ukraine. She has led and participated in numerous international research projects and networks, including the EU-funded COST network In Search for Transcultural Memory in Europe (2012–2016), and is currently a co-leader of the Horizon Europe project Facing the Past: Public History for a Stronger Europe (EUROPAST). She is the author and editor of numerous books and articles in English, Swedish, and Polish. Her selected publications include the edited volumes Cultural Transformations after Communism: Central and Eastern Europe in Focus (2011) and Whose Memory? Which Future? Remembering Ethnic Cleansing and Lost Cultural Diversity in Eastern, Central and Southeastern Europe (2016), as well as the recent article “After All These Years, Still Divided by Memories? East Central Europe and European Union Politics of Memory Twenty Years after the Enlargement” (2024). She is also co-editor of the book series Memory, Heritage and Public History in Central and Eastern Europe.
Speakers:
Natalia Khanenko-Friesen 
Natalia Khanenko-Friesen is an oral historian and cultural anthropologist currently serving as the director of the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies and the Huculak Chair in Ukrainian Culture and Ethnography, both in the Faculty of Arts at the University of Alberta, Canada. Her research interests include oral history, vernacular culture, diasporic and ethnic identities, labor migration, and immigrant letter writing. She has authored or co-edited several monographs, including 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 is tentatively titled Decollectivized: The Last Generation of Soviet Farmers Speak Out. Since February 24, 2022, she has coordinated a number of scholarly initiatives focusing on war testimony research, including hosting the Summer Institute “Witnessing the War on Ukraine.”
Gelinada Grinchenko 
Eleonora Narvselius 
Eleonora Narvselius is an Associate Professor in European Studies at Lund University, Sweden. She has participated in EU- and Nordic-funded research, including Horizon, COST, Erasmus+, NordForsk, and RJ. Her academic interests span Ukrainian Studies, Memory Studies, Migration Studies, and Ethnology. In recent years, her research has focused on the experiences of various migrant communities in Europe, and since 2022, on Ukrainian migrants. Narvselius has collaborated with the Center for Urban History of East Central Europe (Lviv, Ukraine) on the project 24.02.2022, 5 am. Testimonies from the War. She has co-organized the Summer Institute Witnessing the War in Ukraine in 2022−2026. Among her key publications are Ukrainian Intelligentsia in Post-Soviet L’viv: Narratives, Identity and Power (Lexington Books, 2012; Ukrainian translation, 2025), Traitors, Collaborators and Deserters in Contemporary European Politics of Memory: Formulas of Betrayal (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017, co-edited with Gelinada Grinchenko), and Diversity in the East-Central European Borderlands: Memories, Cityscapes, People (Ibidem, 2021, co-edited with Julie Fedor).
This seminar is part of the series “Witnessing Studies and Knowledge Production: Ukraine in Focus.” Read more about the seminar series here.