“And that’s how it was”: Small stories of big histories in post-Soviet Ukraine.
Doctoral project completed in 2021.
Funded by AHRC CHASE Doctoral Studentship
This project began as my doctoral research (funded by an AHRC Doctoral Studentship) investigating the transmission of alternative histories and memory in post-Maidan Ukraine. I carried out three periods of ethnographic fieldwork in Lviv, Ukraine between 2016-18, collecting life histories and examining the role of storytelling, material objects and landscape in the way the past is articulated.
I employed methods such as participant observation, storytelling, material culture, oral history and walking to carry out this research, and payed particular attention to the traumatic nature of memory and storytelling in the context in which I was working.
Since the 2022 full-scale invasion, I have built upon this research, drawing on my expertise on TikTok and Digital Anthropology, to examine the many ways in which Ukrainians are using TikTok to narrate, archive, and communicate about the war. This research is the subject of a number of forthcoming articles and will be explored in my monograph, forthcoming with University of Toronto Press.