Displacement, Emplacement, and Reintegration: IDP Experiences, 2014-2021

A lecture by Emily Channell-Justice, Director of the Temerty Contemporary Ukraine Program at HURI

Moderated by Vlad Nekhoroshykh, Grants Coordinator at HURI

About the Lecture

This presentation explores the question of how anthropologists must navigate the context of war to continue to do research. Dr. Emily Channell-Justice will describe the process of developing her current research on internal displacement in Ukraine since 2014, which was then disrupted by the full-scale invasion. She will discuss data sources that make up this project and pose questions about ethical research during ongoing hostilities. The lecture will also explore the possibilities of collaborative work that may strengthen the research process and improve its conclusions.

The discussion of data will focus on the main data set of Dr. Channell-Justice’s research project, 80 interviews with internally displaced Ukrainians from Donetsk and Luhansk regions and Crimea, which were collected by a Ukrainian anthropologist between 2014 and 2016 and given to Dr. Channell-Justice to use for research in 2019. Dr. Channell-Justice will describe what these interviews reveal about the experience of displacement, but also what they reveal about the nature of doing research when circumstances do not allow for normal ethnographic data collection through long-term participant observation. She will draw from recent writings and presentations by Ukrainian scholars who advocate for ethical and empathetic creation of archives and documentation to preserve people’s experiences of war to ask how this perspective can be applied to previously collected data and how it can guide researchers moving forward with research in and about Ukraine.

About the Speaker

Emily Channell-Justice is the Director of the Temerty Contemporary Ukraine Program at the Ukrainian Research Institute, Harvard University. She is a sociocultural anthropologist who has been doing research in Ukraine since 2012. She has pursued research on political activism and social movements among students and feminists during the 2013-2014 Euromaidan mobilizations. Her book, Without the State: Self-organization and Political Activism (2022, University of Toronto Press), won the 2023 American Association of Ukrainian Studies book prize. She is also the editor of Decolonizing Queer Experience: LGBT+ Narratives from Eastern Europe and Eurasia (2020, Lexington Books). She has published her research in journals including Political and Legal Anthropology Review; Feminist Anthropology; Revolutionary Russia; History and Anthropology; and Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society. She received her PhD from The Graduate Center, City University of New York, in September 2016, and she was a Havighurst Fellow and Visiting Assistant Professor of International Studies at Miami University, Ohio from 2016-2019.

This event is organized by Harvard's Ukrainian Research Institute (HURI) as part of the Harvard Ukrainian Summer Institute (HUSI) Public Lecture Series.

Persons with disabilities who wish to request accommodations or who have questions about access should contact HURI Programs Manager, Megan K. Duncan Smith, at least two weeks in advance of the session.

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