Power Signals: Ukrainian Elites' Facebook Posts as a Source
Taras Fedirko
University of Glasgow / Institute for Human Sciences, Vienna14.5.2026, 17:00
online / Zoom
Historians have long argued that official archival documents speak as much about how power is organized and exercised as about what they ostensibly record. The same critique has been extended to the archive itself, whose silences and inclusions are themselves objects of analysis.
In this talk, Taras Fedirko will carry that line of reasoning into a different terrain. He examines Facebook posts as a source for a sociological and anthropological study of Ukraine’s wartime transformation, drawing on a project that began in 2022 as a documentation of Facebook networks of crowdfunded military aid and grew into a study of public relationship-signalling and reputation-making among the emerging elites of Ukraine’s defense industries.
He focuses on posting practices among officials in the war cabinet, and on the relations that they signal. Placing them within current theorizations of the Ukrainian political regime, the researcher reads them alongside investigative leaks that, by exposing what the posts remain silent about, throw into relief the choices that constitute the source. Pursued this way, Facebook posts — like the archetypal archival document — speak as much about how wartime power is organized and exercised as about what they record. Their utility and their limits as a source both turn on the changing role of publicity in the constitution of political authority in wartime Ukraine.
The event will be held online in English with simultaneous translation into Ukrainian. To participate, please, fill out the registration form. The Zoom link will be sent after the registration.
Senior research fellow at the IWM and a lecturer at the University of Glasgow’s School of Social and Political Sciences. He is a political and economic anthropologist whose research explores how social movements organize to transform war economies, states, and capitalist labor and value regimes. Since 2022 he has led an international research group studying how a decade of war has transformed Ukraine’s civic elites and power networks. Moderator of the event. Historian, researcher, archivist at the Urban Media Archive. Currently, she is finishing her PhD studies at the Ukrainian Catholic University, where she is working on writing an intellectual biography of the historian Ivan Krypiakevych. In the Urban Media Archive she works with the collection of Visual Documentation of War.
Taras Fedirko
University of Glasgow / Institute for Human Sciences, Vienna 
Liana Blikharska
Center for Urban History
The event will take place as part of the public program "Source as a Choice" organized by the Center for Urban History in partnership with Documenting Ukraine / IWM and Research Centre Ukraine / Max Weber Foundation.
During the meetings, researchers will share their work with various sources on war and mass violence in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The choice to create and preserve sources can be one of the tools for embodying this violence or, on the contrary, for opposing it. Our choice to talk about these events through the prism of certain sources creates a field in which the complex past will live on in the present and future.
Credits
Cover Image: from "processing" exhibition, 2020 / Bohdan Yemets / Center for Urban History