In November 2023, the annual conference of the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES) took place, with members of the Ukrainian Oral History Association participating. The conference theme, “Decolonization,” attracted significant interest from researchers and amplified discussions about and from Ukraine.
One of the key events was a roundtable titled “Building Home in Peace and War: Narratives of Ukrainian Displacement, Loss, and Resilience,” featuring Eleonora Narvselius, Natalia Khanenko-Friesen, and Oksana Kuzmenko. The roundtable was chaired by anthropologist Alina Doboszewska (Jagiellonian University, Poland), with sociologist Olena Strelnik (Technical University of Munich) serving as the discussant.
Dr. Eleonora Narvselius (Lund University, Sweden) presented her ongoing research project, “Making it Home: An Aesthetic Methodological Contribution to the Study of Migrant Home-Making and Politics of Integration,” in her talk “Ukrainians in Wrocław: Homecoming in Times of Peace and War.” She explored key issues surrounding the concept of home and the strategies employed by Ukrainians in Wrocław to establish a sense of belonging at the start of the war. The city gained international attention for its exceptional reception of Ukrainian refugees. Her research, based on 10 focus groups and a conceptual framework developed for the project, offers theoretical and methodological tools that could be useful for further studies in other Polish cities experiencing similar demographic changes.
In her presentation, “Across the Ocean: Ukrainian Displaced Persons in Canada Speak About Home,” Dr. Natalia Khanenko-Friesen (University of Alberta, Canada) shared insights from the oral history project “Recreating Home in Peace and War: Ukrainian Refugees in Canada.” Led by Dr. Khanenko-Friesen, the project examines the experiences of Ukrainians arriving in Canada under the Canada-Ukraine Authorization for Emergency Travel (CUAET) visa program. Her research focuses on the interactions between migrants, Canadians, and Ukrainian Canadians, offering an analytical overview of video interviews and their narrative strategies. Methodologically, she addressed key challenges, including how the study itself helps to construct new meanings of “home.” Her work explores how war-displaced individuals redefine home and how their perceptions shift throughout the refugee experience and adaptation process. She also emphasized the critical role of host-country environments in shaping the integration of Ukrainians. Another key research focus was the concept of “escaping from home” and how this experience reshapes both material and symbolic understandings of home for newly arrived Ukrainians.
Dr. Oksana Kuzmenko (Institute of Ethnology, National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine) provided a different perspective in her talk “Where is My Home? War and the Lost Ukrainian Home.” Adopting an autoethnographic approach, she reflected on her experience living with internally displaced persons (IDPs) in Lviv, which became both a temporary shelter and a transit city for hundreds of thousands of refugees. Her analysis drew from personal female narratives, survey responses from IDPs, and a structural-semantic analysis of an autobiographical account by a woman from Kharkiv, who described her experiences during the first weeks of the full-scale invasion and her later reflections. Dr. Kuzmenko examined how narratives of displacement function as both historical testimonies and tools for processing trauma. She also discussed the differences between “female” and “male” war narratives, the completeness of these reflections, and how displaced individuals verbalize the concept of the “foreign” home—often contrasting it with their “native” home, which retains strong symbolic meanings (home = family, children, work, Ukraine). Negative wartime experiences further shape new interpretations of home, with some narrators describing home as a “target,” a “ruin,” or a “place of revenge,” reinforcing the idea of home as an unstable and constantly shifting reality during war.
Dr. Yuliia Skubytska participated in two conference panels. The first focused on the role of museums in public space, where she shared her experience as the director of the Museum of War Childhood in Ukraine. She encouraged colleagues to recognize museums as crucial platforms for raising awareness and fostering discussions about socially significant and complex issues, including those related to wartime experiences.
In the second panel, which explored gender norms and performative practices in Soviet Ukraine and the German Democratic Republic, Dr. Skubytska analyzed a series of interviews documenting the experiences of teenage girls in Soviet Ukraine. She argued that Soviet authorities and the educational system systematically avoided addressing the evolving needs of adolescent girls while simultaneously enforcing rigid expectations of femininity. Her analysis highlighted how state ideology shaped gender roles and overlooked the changing realities of young women’s lives.
The participation of UOHA members in the ASEEES conference contributed to important scholarly discussions on displacement, memory, and the impact of war on identity. The roundtable and presentations provided valuable perspectives on how Ukrainians navigate the concept of home in times of crisis, offering theoretical and methodological insights for future research on forced migration, trauma, and oral history.