Huculak Chair Report: December 2022
14 December 2022
Dr. Khanenko-Friesen has been maintaining a busy schedule in the past semester, both as a Huculak Chair and the Director of the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies. Her CIUS activities are reported via Institute newsletters and updates and her Huculak Chair activities are reported via KFC channels.
Back in July, Dr. Khanenko-Friesen served as a Summer Institute Organizing Committee Chair and led the development and organization of the inaugural Witnessing the War in Ukraine: Summer Institute in Oral History. The institute was initiated and organized by the Huculak Chair in collaboration with five other international partners, and was held at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow from 16-19 July, 2022. 12 globally recognized key voices in oral history and 35 practicing oral historians from around the world debated and discussed research needs and fieldwork challenges of interview-based research in the context of the ongoing war on Ukraine. Financial support has come from the Huculak Chair, Kule Folklore Centre, Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, Faculty of Arts Research Office and UAlberta Conference Grant.
In this institute, Natalia led and presented in two stand alone events. On July 16, she organized and presented in the panel Surviving War and Researching Its Tragedy: Ethics, Responsibility and Representation in Oral History of Recent and Unfolding Trauma. In this session, she was joined by Hasan Hasanovic, Srebrenica-Potočari Memorial Center, author of Voices of Srebrenica, and Gelinada Grinchenko, V. N. Karazin Kharkiv National University. On July 18, she and Dr. Marcin Jarząbek, Jagiellonian University, co-hosted a Seminar Designing research, formulating objectives, and asking research questions. Using examples of various oral history projects, this seminar focused on methodological and conceptual framing of oral historical research projects.
To report on the work of this institute to the KFC community, in the fall, on September 23, she organized the online Folklore Lunch presentation in which she, along with Gelinada Grinchenko and Iuliia Skubytska, discussed the work and successes of the Institute. You can read more about this event in the section on Folklore Lunches at KFC.
On September 29, wearing the hat of an oral historian, in September, Dr. Khanenko-Friesen traveled to Toronto to deliver a keynote presentation during the book launch of a very important oral history collection recently published by the Ukrainian Canadian Research and Development Centre in Toronto and the CIUS Press. The presentation and the book launch of The Extraordinary Lives of Ukrainian-Canadian Women (ed. Iroida Wynnyckyj. CIUS Press 2022) were held at UNF Hall with more than a hundred people in attendance.
On October 5, on the invitation of Centre for Oral History and Tradition (COHT) at the U of Lethbridge, Dr. Khanenko-Friesen traveled to Lethbridge to deliver two invited presentations Oral History and Moral Responsibility: Working as a Ukrainianist Towards Truth and Reconciliation and What Stories Can Do: Oral History, Storytelling and Decollectivization in Ukraine. COHT is Canada’s most prominent and active oral history centre, known for its projects and activities locally, nationally and internationally. Colleagues at COHT and Natalia discussed future potential collaboration in the area of oral history pedagogy.
As a researcher with a focus on Ukrainian diaspora, and a co-host of the influential “Historians and the War: Rethinking the Future” Series (Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies and German-Ukrainian Historians Commission, Germany-Ukraine), Dr. Khanenko-Friesen coordinated and hosted the round table discussion on the current global Ukrainian refugee crisis. The tenth online seminar of the series, titled “The Human Toll of a War: Comparative Perspectives on Displacement, Resettlement, and Emigration of Ukrainians in the 20th and 21st Centuries,” took place on 27 October, 2022. The invited speakers were Drs. Lubomyr Luciuk, Royal Military College of Canada, Kingston, Oksana Mikheeva, European University Viadrina, Frankfurt, and Victoria Sereda, Ukrainian Catholic University, Lviv with Dr. Khanenko-Friesen as a moderator.
On October 29, in Winnipeg, during the Ukrainian Canadian Triennial Congress, Dr. Khanenko-Friesen was invited to present in the workshop The Future of Slavic Studies in the Post-War Context where she spoke about history and past geopolitical contexts that shaped the current state of Slavic Studies on the North American continent, and offered some considerations for future.
On November 3-5, Harriman Institute at Columbia University, New York, hosted an international conference Ukraine in North America: Diaspora Activism, Academic Initiatives, organized by the Ukrainian Studies Program at the Harriman Institute, Columbia University. Dr. Khanenko-Friesen was invited to present at this conference in the opening session with the presentation “From Ethnic Minorities to a Global Community: Re-Defining Ukrainian Diaspora in the era of Post-Globalization.”
On November 10-13, Chicago hosted the annual ASEEES conference. Together with Drs. Jelena Pogosjan and Alex Averbuch, Natalia was pleased to present her ongoing research findings in the panel devoted to the KFC project Confiscated Letters, with the paper “A third party to a family letter: Diaspora, Homeland and the KGB in the Ukrainian family correspondence across the Atlantic.”
Projects on the go:
Dr. Khanenko-Friesen is pleased to report that one of early independent Ukraine’s key oral history projects is translated and now being published in English by McGuill-Queen's University Press. William Noll’s “Transformation of Civil Society: Oral History of Ukrainian Rural Culture of the 1920-30s”. As an oral historian and the developer of the online digital archives for the interviews on which the book is based, Dr. Khanenko-Friesen also wrote an introduction to this book translation published by McGill-Queen's University Press. The book was printed in April 2023. At the recent conference of Association for the Study of Nationalities held at the Harriman Institute on the campus of Columbia University (New York
Another exciting project is the publication of the special issue of Ukraina Moderna, a scholarly peer-reviewed journal based in Ukraine, devoted to the study of the global Ukrainian diaspora. The special issue is titled “From Emigration to Diaspora: Ukrainians Abroad.” Dr. Khanenko-Friesen, Drs. Serge Cipko and Kateryna Kobchenko, collaborated on this issue as co-editors. In this issue, Dr. Khanenko-Friesen and Dr. Vic Satzewich discussed the state of the field in the special exchange section “Ukrainian Diaspora from the Perspective of Today”, and also co-published an article focusing on Post-1991 immigration to Canada. At the recent conference Ukrainian Immigration to Canada: From Post-Independent to Post-War in April 11-12, 2022, which she initiated at CIUS, Natalia also organized and hosted a roundtable discussion with community leaders across the province who are currently assisting with receiving and settlement of arriving Ukrainian displaced persons to Alberta.
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