The war gave everyone a role—what’s yours?”: Documenting Stories Amid Crisis

Sponsored By: The REEES Program at the Yale MacMillan Center and the Yale Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies
After the full-scale Russian invasion, researchers in Ukraine – among many other things – were forced to reconsider their professional practices. The urgency of response to unprecedented events combined with the need to navigate numerous vulnerabilities, respond to ethical challenges, and follow principles of academic compliance. Natalia Otrishchenko will address all of these issues based on the experience of the international documentation initiative “24/02/22, 5 am,” launched in early March 2022 to document the war’s everydayness through personal stories of internally displaced people and volunteers.
Natalia Otrishchenko is a research fellow at the Center for Urban History in Lviv and an associate researcher at the Center for Contemporary History in Potsdam. She holds a Ph.D. in Sociology (2015, Institute of Sociology, the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine). Since March 2022, Natalia has led the Ukrainian team within the “24/02/22, 5 am” international documentation initiative. This Fall, she is a Fulbright visiting scholar at the Department of Sociology, Columbia University. Natalia is interested in qualitative research methods, oral history, as well as urban sociology, spatial and social transformations after state socialism.