Ukrainian Academics in the Context of the Russo-Ukrainian War– lecture by Kiselyova & Ivashchenko скачать в хорошем качестве

Ukrainian Academics in the Context of the Russo-Ukrainian War– lecture by Kiselyova & Ivashchenko

How does war threaten not only academic institutions, but also the personal identities, emotional worlds, and professional trajectories of scholars? This lecture explores the deeply human dimensions of academic freedom under wartime conditions through the experiences of displaced Ukrainian academics. Presented as part of the HAIT colloquium “Under Pressure. Attacks on Science in Democracies and Dictatorships” in the winter semester 2025/26, the talk examines how scholars’ agency becomes both a manifestation of these threats and an active response to them. Drawing on semi-structured oral history interviews from the long-term research project “Moving West”: Ukrainian Academics in Conditions of Forced Migration (2014–2024), the lecture argues that for many Ukrainian scholars, the war represents an existential danger—not only due to physical risks, but because it threatens their familial stability, professional purpose, and the future of their country. This understanding shapes how displaced scholars navigate feelings of vulnerability, guilt, and responsibility, and how they rebuild and redefine their academic identity abroad. Their experiences in Western institutions, in turn, prompt a critical reassessment of their role within the Ukrainian academic community and its future reconstruction. Yulia Kiselyova is an Associate Professor in the Department of Historiography, Source Studies, and Archaeology at V. N. Karazin Kharkiv National University. A specialist in Ukrainian historiography, she is the author of Formation and Development of Historiographical Studies at Imperial Kharkiv University (2014) and editor of “Please Do Not Decline”: Appeals of Humanities Scholars and Members of Their Families to the Authorities in the Early 1920s (2021). Her research focuses on the professional ethos of Ukrainian historians during periods of transition, and she has been involved in numerous national and international research projects on university culture, self-representation, and cultural heritage in times of war. Viktoriia Ivashchenko is Associate Professor in the same department and Director of the V. N. Karazin Kharkiv National University History Museum. Her scholarship centers on the representation of academic communities in ego-documents, and she leads several oral history projects, including “Images of University Science: Kharkiv University in the 1940s and 1980s” and “Kharkiv Citizen at the Fronts of ATO.” She has edited the long-running series Kharkiv University in the Memory of Its Faculty and Alumni and contributed to international collaborations with the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, the Gerda Henkel Foundation, and research institutions across Ukraine and Europe. 📢 Join the conversation! Share your thoughts in the comments and subscribe to the channel for more lectures exploring the intersections of knowledge, conflict, and society. Das Hannah-Arendt-Institut für Totalitarismusforschung im Netz Webseite: https://hait.tu-dresden.de Blog: https://haitblog.hypotheses.org Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/hait-tud.bsk... Dieses Video steht unter der Creative Commons Lizenz CC BY-SA 4.0 und darf unter Namensnennung und Weitergabe unter gleichen Bedingungen weiterverwendet werden.