HAIT-Kolloquium
Between Mission and Vulnerability: The Experiences of Displaced Ukrainian Academics in the Context of the Russo-Ukrainian War

The threat to academic freedom, as well as to the development of science and education during wartime, has not only institutional but also deeply personal dimensions. It affects scholars’ sense of identity and professional purpose. It is the agency of scholars that becomes both an indication of these threats and a response to them. Our main hypothesis is that for many Ukrainian scholars, the war represents an existential threat – not only as a risk of physical violence, but as a danger to their personal, familial, and professional existence, and to the future of their country and people. This understanding shapes both the nature and the direction of the agency displayed by displaced Ukrainian scholars. Drawing on semi-structured oral history interviews, collected in the framework of project “Moving West”: Ukrainian Academics in Conditions of Forced Migration (2014–2024) we analyze how scholars navigate feelings of vulnerability, guilt, and responsibility, and how they reconfigure their academic identity abroad, not merely as a matter of survival, but as an active and mission-driven response to war. This process also involves a critical rethinking of their place and role within the Ukrainian academic community, shaped by the knowledge, practices, and positionality acquired through their experience in Western institutions.

Yulia Kiselyova is Associate Professor at the Department of Historiography, Source Studies, and Archaeology, V. N. Karazin Kharkiv National University. She specializes in Ukrainian historiography and has published a book on the Formation and Development of Historiographical Studies at Imperial Kharkiv University (Kharkiv, 2014). She has been an editor and the author of the foreword of the document collection “Please Do Not Decline”: Appeals of Humanities Scholars and Members of Their Families to the Authorities in the Early 1920s (2021).
She is interested in the evolution of the professional ethos of Ukrainian historians during transitional periods (the early Soviet era and the years of Ukraine’s independence, Russian-Ukrainian war) studying the issues of changing values, the accompanying emotional practices of their expression in response to external events and the structural conditions.
She has participated in the Research Project “University Culture in the Ukrainian Intellectual Space (19th - Early 21st Century)”. During 2018-2022, as a participant in the two projects supported by Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, University of Alberta: “Practices of the Self-Representation of Multinational Cities in the Industrial and Post-Industrial Era,” and «City аnd War: Destruction, Preservation and Rethinking of the Urban Cultural Heritage of Large Cities in Eastern and Southern Ukraine within the Russia's Military Aggression». During 2024-2025 she took part in research Project “Sources for heraldry of the cities of the Kingdom of Poland: from genesis to reception”, financed by Poland Minister of Science.
The author together with Viktoriia Ivashchenko of Research Oral History Project “Moving West”: Ukrainian Academics in Conditions of Forced Migration”, sponsored by Max Plank Institute for the History of Science (2022), and Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen (Documenting Ukraine grant, 2023).
Viktoriia Ivashchenko is Associate Professor at the Department of Historiography, Source Studies, and Archeology, V. N. Karazin Kharkiv National University, and the director of V. N. Karazin Kharkiv National University History Museum. At the same time since 2022 until 31 December 2023, Adjunct at the Museum of the Eastern Territories of the Old Polish Republic, branch of the National Museum in Lublin.
Her research interests center around the peculiarities of the representation of the scientific community in ego-documents. She is a head of the oral history projects “Images of University Science: Kharkiv University in the 1940s and 1980s” (2006–present), “Kharkiv Citizen at the Fronts of ATO” (2018–2022), conducted at the V. N. Karazin Kharkiv National University History Museum. She has been an Еditor of the series Kharkiv University in the Memory of Its Faculty and Alumni: Collection of Documents (Kharkiv, 2004–2023, in Ukrainian), has participated in the international research project Drinov`s epistolary heritage in collaboration with the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences (2009–2022), in the international research project DHI Moscow supported by the Gerda Henkel Foundation Transfer and Adaptation of the University Education in the Russian Empire in the second half 18 – first half 19 centuries (200 –2010), research project supported by the Ministry of Education and Science of Ukraine University Culture in the Ukrainian Intellectual Space (2004–2013).

 

The lecture is part of the HAIT-colloquium „Under pressure. Attacks on science in democracies and dictatorships“ in the winter semester 2025/26.

The colloquium takes place via Zoom. Please register to participate by Monday, November 17, by sending your full name to: hait@tu-dresden.de. The registration link will be sent to you separately a few days before the event begins.

This event is financed by the Saxon State government out of the State budget approved by the Saxon State Parliament.