Gathering, Archiving, Disclosing: Oral History of the Ukrainian Experience of 2022- Russian Aggression
Time: 2025-09-18 14:30 - 16:30
Location: Conference room at Auditorium Maximum
Chairman: Kaja Kaźmierska
Events within this Session
What is Sensitive, and for Whom? Sensitive Information in War Testimonies
Type: session | Language: English
Time: 14:30 - 16:30
Abstract
The epistemic gap between understanding sensitive information offered by institutions, the definitions created by scholars, and how narrators in oral history interviews address this concept is at the core of our presentation. The situation of full-scale Russian aggression against Ukraine has given rise to a series of discussions concerning the ethical and methodological challenges of researchers’ work in conditions of high uncertainty. Among many other things, one of the directions of these conversations was the problem of access to sensitive information, the disclosure of which in the public space could have negative consequences for the interviewees or their communities. Our documentation initiative launched in 2022 shows that definitions and procedures developed for peacetime and to protect people’s privacy do not always work in wartime. By appealing to the ideas of participatory approaches, we aim to bring storytellers back into the debate about sensitive data. We build our reflections on the interviews conducted in 2024 with the same people whose stories were recorded in Poland and Ukraine in 2022-23 and the experience of international projects “24.02.2022, 5 am. Testimonies from the War” and “Researching the Collecting, Preserving, Analysing, and Disclosing of Ukrainian Testimonies of the War”.
Speakers
The Interviewer’s Sincere Autoethnography: what does it Mean to be Both a Researcher and a Ukrainian in the Project of Interviewing Ukrainian Refugees in Poland
Type: session | Language: English
Time: 14:30 - 16:30
Abstract
Unlike researchers who talk to their narrators about the past, in particular about their experiences during World War II, the interviewers in the project “Researching the Collecting, Preserving, Analysing, and Disclosing of Ukrainian Testimonies of the War”. do not have such a temporal distance between their present and their respondents’ stories. On the contrary, for both participants (researcher and interviewee), this is a single temporal continuum. For a Ukrainian interviewer in such a project, this is often also the only single spatial continuum they share with their respondents. The Ukrainian researcher and his interviewee are both actors and witnesses of the events that happened in Ukraine after 24.02.2022, in some cases, Ukrainians who therefore ended up in Poland because of this and later, in the moment of interview, they talk about their experiences during the war. The only difference between them will be that one (the narrator) will talk about his experience, and the other (the interviewer) will listen. In fact, in our view, during such an interview, there is a “silent” self-interviewing of the interviewer. Without always saying his remarks out loud, the interviewer shares his experience with the respondent in the language of emotions, body language, feelings, thoughts, which, of course, are known only to him and together make up his story during the war and perception of these events. In this presentation, through the prism of the evoke autoethnography approach, it is proposed to show how during the interview the interviewer unconsciously conducts his self-interview. Also, to show how the interviewer’s definition of his own positionality/ its plurality affects the conversation and the construction of his experience, in particular, through the existence of two beginnings in the interviewer - national (Ukrainian) and research.
Speakers
Codifying Sensitive Information Into Metadata: Potential and Challenges
Type: session | Language: English
Time: 14:30 - 16:30
Abstract
The paper will present the results of a research aimed at determining the optimal parameters by which a user can search for information from interviews, while ensuring the protection (non-disclosure) of confidential or sensitive data with maximum consideration of the interviewees’ wishes. The research is based on a collection of interviews recorded by the Ukrainian team as part of the documentation initiative “24/02/22, 5 am: Testimonies from the War” and the U-CORE project, which conducted second interviews with people who agreed to participate in it. One of the tasks for the second wave of interviews is to clarify the conditions for archiving and disclosing information revealed by our narrators in the conversations recorded in 2022. Also, the purpose of this second meeting is to review the privacy options of the personal data previously provided by the narrators. Therefore, in my presentation, I will try to answer the following questions: how to adapt the metadata of the storytellers to take into account the changes in the confidentiality of the information recorded in the second wave of interviews; whether it is possible to create a system of codes in MAXQDA taking into account the protection of sensitive data; whether the system of codes developed in MAXQDA can work correctly in different digital environments.
Speakers
A (Human) Geography of Ukrainian Migration Testimonies of the War and Visualisation Criticism
Type: session | Language: English
Time: 14:30 - 16:30
Abstract
Following the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine, we co-initiated an emergency documentation project gathering testimonies of Ukrainian citizens on the move. Within the current research project “Researching the Collecting, Preserving, Analysing and Disclosing of Ukrainian Testimonies of the War”, interviewees are revisited (www.u-core.org). This paper uses a selection of these double interviews with Ukrainian citizens who received temporary refugee status in Luxembourg. Whereas some of them were interviewed a second time, others had in the meantime moved on. The author offers insights into digital visualisations of the interviewees’ narrated experiences of migration. She compares and reflects upon the possibility of geographic cartography (in the software Nodegoat, and a humanistic approach to digital mapping, such as visualised narration or emotional cartography for a visual expression of the gendered subjectivities and embodied emotions related to the interviewees’ mediation and appropriation of space. Special attention is paid to the question how digital mapping can display the evolution of interviewees’ understanding of space from the first to the second round interview, e.g., through time-controlled geographic visualisation in Nodegoat or layered visual overlapping in human geographic cartography.
Speakers
Digitally Preserving and Disclosing Ukrainian Testimonies of the War
Type: session | Language: English
Time: 14:30 - 16:30
Abstract
This paper discusses the ongoing process of digitally preserving and disclosing testimonies about the Russian full scale invasion of Ukraine collected within the research projects ’24.02.2022, 5am. Testimonies from the War’ and ‘Researching the Collecting, Preserving, Analysing and Disclosing of Ukrainian Testimonies of the War’. The authors present the creation process of a central digital environment with unlimited access for researchers within CatDV. They also provide an insight into their hands-on experimentation with different digital platforms to prepare the transfer of the testimonies with their metadata for dissemination outside of the project. This includes a critical assessment of the technical possibilities of multi- level access offered by the platform Oral History.digital, as well as a reflection about the accompanying qualitative modalities for data access they intend to compose.