Guest Lecture | Anna Wylegała (Warsaw) | Talking about the Russian War against Ukraine from Women’s Perspectives

The ScienceCampus is pleased to highlight this collaborative guest lecture by Anna Wylegała (Warsaw) from the Polish Academy of Sciences. Sabine Rutar will moderate the event, as part of Natali Stegmann’s seminar “Geschichtspolitiken nach 1945 und nach 1989 in Deutschland, Polen und Tschechien zwischen Instrumentalisierung und Verifizierung.“ The seminar is open to the public as well as colleagues from Regensburg and elsewhere.

Abstract:

The project 24.02.2022, 5 am: Testimonies of War, carried out by a Polish-Ukrainian-Luxembourgish-German team since spring 2022, documents the Ukrainian civilian experience of war. Although this was not its original intention, in Poland it ultimately came to focus on collecting women’s accounts: of the 210 interviews recorded between June 2022 and October 2023, only 21 were submitted by men. This is, of course, due to the nature of the forced war migration from Ukraine. In this talk, Anna Wylegała will reflect on the methodological specificities of (almost exclusively) female researchers working with (almost exclusively) female interviewees. She asks: Is there something like a women’s experience, and consequently: narrative, of war?

Bio:

Anna Wylegała is a sociologist and Associate Professor at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology, Polish Academy of Sciences. Her work focuses on the social history of the II World War and the immediate postwar period. She is also interested in the qualitative methodology of social research, oral history and memory studies. She is author of "Displaced Memories: Remembering and Forgetting in Post-War Poland and Ukraine" (2019) and "Był dwór, nie ma dworu. Reforma rolna w Polsce" [There was an estate, there is no estate any more. Agricultural reform in Poland] (2021). She also co-edited two other volumes: "The Burden of the Past: History, Memory and Identity in Contemporary Ukraine" (2020), and "No Neighbors' Lands: Vanishing Others in Postwar Europe".

She will be a visiting researcher at the Leibniz ScienceCampus Europe and America from 12–18 January 2025. She will be collaborating with Sabine Rutar (IOS Regensburg) and Natali Stegmann (UR), who have applied for ScienceCampus Seed Money, to develop research ideas relating to Graphic Novels as a Medium to Visualise Historical Experience of Mass Violence and Refuge. She will also discuss her research on Researching the Collection, Preserving, Analysing and Disclosing of Ukrainian Testimonies of war, as well as presenting the output from a previous project developed with Sabine Rutar on oral history.