Witnessing the War on Ukraine Summer Institute
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.
New seminar series “Witnessing Studies and Knowledge Production: Ukraine in Focus”
Witnessing the War on Ukraine Summer Institutes
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.
Read more about the past years below.
2026 | Witnessing the War on Ukraine: Beyond Testimony – Silences, Gaps, and Unspoken Memories
WWSI 2026 focused on the limits of testimony and on the methodological, ethical, and interpretive challenges of engaging with silence, self-censorship, and the unspoken in war narratives.
2025 | Witnessing the War on Ukraine: Testimonies as Cultural Heritage for Future Memory Landscapes
WWSI 2025 addressed oral history as a socially and historically responsible research practice, focusing on the conceptualization and preservation of war testimony as cultural heritage and as a foundation for future historical memory in Ukraine.
2024 | Witnessing the War on Ukraine: Testimony in the Pursuit of Justice
WWSI 2024 explored testimony research in the pursuit of justice, emphasizing innovative disciplinary approaches and the creation of spaces of trust and dignity for victims.
2023 | Witnessing the War in Ukraine: Vectors of Reflection, Practices of Documentation
WWSI 2023 examined contemporary scholarly and creative approaches to witnessing the war.
Witnessing the War on Ukraine Summer Institute 2022
WWSI 2022 focused on a “rapid response” to the ethical challenges of conducting research amid ongoing trauma and on how to carry out interviews without causing harm.
Organizers and Partners
Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, Canada | Ukrainian Oral History Association, Ukraine | Uzhhorod National University, Ukraine | University of Alberta, Canada | National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, Ukraine | Lund University, Sweden | Dobra Wola Foundation, Poland
If you have any questions,contact us at wwsi@ualberta.ca