Home-Making in Displacement Among Ukrainians in Europe and North America: Collective Memories and Re(Dis)Located Heritages in the Wake of Russian Aggression
Date and Time
Location
A lecture by Eleonora Narvselius, HURI Visiting Scholar and Associate Professor of European Studies at Lund University, Sweden
Moderated by Emma Mateo, Mihaychuk Postdoctoral Fellow at the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute and HUSI 2026 instructor
IN-PERSON and ONLINE via Zoom Webinar (live). Please register to attend in-person using the "REGISTER HERE" button above. To join online via Zoom, please register here.
This event is organized by HURI as part of the Harvard Ukrainian Summer Institute (HUSI) Public Lecture Series.
About the Lecture
Drawing on anthropological, sociological, and historical scholarship, this talk examines how Ukrainians escaping Russian aggression mobilize their collective memories and heritages across selected host countries, each characterized by specific historical connections with Ukraine. Of special interest in this regard is how the displaced Ukrainians engage with their collective past through encounters with the collective pasts of their host societies.
This engagement is, arguably, not merely retrospective; rather, it is part of a broader process through which displaced individuals make their experiences legible to host societies, inscribe themselves into future-oriented narratives, and (re)imagine home. Rather than treating home-making and displacement separately, ‘home-making in displacement’ can be theorized as a complex cultural practice aimed at creating safe and controllable spaces that are not necessarily permanent, yet do not imply “stuckness” in temporariness and precarity.
Home-making in displacement is thus understood as being shaped by forms of 'practical pasts' and collective remembrance that evoke other places and times. Examining these layers enables an important shift in focus from spatial dimensions of migrant home-making to the ongoing labor of engaging with the collective past among the displaced.
About the Speaker
Dr. Eleonora Narvselius is an Associate Professor of European Studies at Lund University, Sweden. She has participated in EU- and Nordic-funded research, including Horizon, COST, Erasmus+, NordForsk, and Riksbankens Jubileumsfond. Her academic interests span Ukrainian studies, memory studies, migration studies, ethnology and anthropology. In recent years, her research has focused on the experiences of various migrant communities in Europe, and since 2022, on Ukrainian migrants. Narvselius has co-organized the Witnessing the War on Ukraine Summer Institute (WWSI) in 2022−2026. Among her key publications are Ukrainian Intelligentsia in Post-Soviet L’viv: Narratives, Identity and Power (Lexington Books, 2012; Ukrainian translation, 2025); Traitors, Collaborators, and Deserters in Contemporary European Politics of Memory: Formulas of Betrayal (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017, co-edited with Gelinada Grinchenko); Diversity in the East-Central European Borderlands: Memories, Cityscapes, People (Ibidem, 2021, co-edited with Julie Fedor); and Witnessing the War on Ukraine: Academic, Activist and Aesthetic Vectors of Reflection (Palgrave Macmillan, forthcoming, 2026, co-edited with Natalia Khanenko-Friesen, Gelinada Grinchenko and Alina Doboszewska).