Hannah Grondelaers is an FWO PhD Fellow affiliated with the Department of Social Work and Social Pedagogy at Ghent University (Belgium). She holds a bachelor's and a master's degree in History from KU Leuven and a master's degree in Conflict and Development Studies from Ghent University.

Hannah's PhD project focuses on Ukrainian women displaced to Belgium after Russia's full-scale invasion in 2022, who continue to return to Ukraine during the war. As they travel, the women document daily life in Ukraine with photographs and videos they record on their phones as part of longitudinal photovoice research. Using multi-scalar ethnography, Hannah studies how Ukraine is imagined both by the women recording their back-and-forth travels, and by policy actors at the scales of the European Union, Ukraine, Belgium and Flanders. She is interested in the way these imaginaries structure – and often flatten or essentialize – reality, and the epistemic potential of the audiovisual material collected by the women while travelling to Ukraine.

During her residency at the Center for Urban History, Hannah will work on an article in which she conceptualizes the women's documentation of life in Ukraine as a form of counter-archiving against the dominant prism of spectacular violence through which Ukraine is often framed in Western mainstream media.