Those who record the stories of war. Presentation of the book in Kharkiv
Viktoria Nesterenko, Artem Kharchenko, Natalia Otrishchenko
12.6.2025, 14:00
Kharkiv
The experiences of war are recorded in different ways: someone keeps a diary, someone looks at the world through a camera, someone saves messages on social media or satellite images, someone talks to witnesses. The book Conversations with Those Who Ask About the War is dedicated to these people – those who record eyewitness stories.
Natalia Otrishchenko, a sociologist and researcher at the Center for Urban History, met with her colleagues who interview people about their lives during Russia's full-scale war against Ukraine. These meetings have become separate chapters: they tell the stories of rooting and forced displacement, the creation of archives and the search for justice, the desire to preserve the human dimension of the war and pass on knowledge about it to others-those who are near us and those who will come after us.
During the presentation with the participation of historian Viktoria Nesterenko and historian Artem Kharchenko, we will discuss how the roles of researchers of the past change in times of war, what questions should and should not be asked of witnesses of events, and what gives hope in times of incompleteness.
Viktoria Nesterenko
Senior lecturer at V. N. Karazin Kharkiv National University and a researcher at the Museum of War Childhood. In 2019, she defended her dissertation at Zaporizhzhia National University. She has been working at the Museum of Military Childhood since 2020. The main thing that attracts her to this work is the opportunity to give people a safe space to tell difficult stories. Her interests include documenting the war through oral history approaches.
Artem Kharchenko
Historian, associate professor at the I. P. Kotliarevsky Kharkiv National University of Arts. Co-founder of the Center for the Study of Interethnic Relations in Eastern Europe. He was a visiting researcher at the Simon Dubnow Institute (Leipzig) in 2016, New Europe College (Bucharest) in 2018, and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 2018. His research interests include social history, Jewish studies, and genocide studies.
Natalia Otrishchenko
Researcher and coordinator of oral history projects at the Center for Urban History of East Central Europe, PhD in Sociology. In 2019-22, she was affiliated with the Center for Contemporary History in Potsdam, and in 2024-25 she was a UNET Fellow at the Center for East European and International Studies in Berlin. She is a graduate of the Fulbright program. Since March 2022, she has been working in the international documentary initiative “24.02.22, 5 am: Testimonies from the War”. She is interested in how knowledge about the social world is created.
Credits
Cover Image: Bohdan Yemets