Ukrainian (Working) Lives: Vulnerabilities, Shifting Geographies, Resistance

Four years after the start of the Russian full-scale invasion preceded by eight years of Russian war of aggression against Ukraine, resilience, heroism, and national unity have become dominant terms to describe Ukraine’s outstanding defense and perseverance. This workshop will focus on how omnipresent violence, shifting borders, mobilisation, occupation, and infrastructural destruction have reshaped everyday working lives and trajectories, how the war has transformed the country's economic geography and thereby changed the labour market, while also producing new vulnerabilities (war injuries, psychological trauma, housing loss, and material precariousness), alongside profound gendered transformations (military mobilisation, restrictions on men’s mobility). We aim at exploring new or transformed forms of agency in Ukraine at work (multiple ways in which labour is performed, reorganised, interrupted, displaced, or reinvented under conditions of war).

Particular attention will be paid to professional sectors and social groups based on skills rather than education, including agriculture, care work, transport, trade, industry, along the workers of public services, as these groups have received less media and scholarly attention. The workshop will take into account multiple and intersecting forms of mobility: internal displacement, migration abroad, circular and commuting migration, as well as the experiences of those who have remained in areas under constant threat.

The workshop focuses on wartime Ukraine, from 2014 to the present, with a particular interest on the period after the full-scale Russian invasion of February 2022, understood as a prolonged and transformative condition rather than a temporary rupture. Spatially, it adopts a multi-scalar perspective, encompassing front-line and occupied territories, rear areas, rural regions, small and medium-sized towns, and metropolitan centers, as well as transnational spaces shaped by labour migration and displacement.

Organised by the French-German Centre Marc Bloch in Berlin, the ZOiS and the KIU Competence Network Interdisciplinary Ukrainian Studies Frankfurt (Oder) – Berlin, the workshop aims to foster dialogue between scholars working in different national, disciplinary, and methodological traditions, and to connect empirical research on Ukraine with broader debates on war, labour, migration, and democracy in Europe. It prioritises research based on fieldwork (interviews, observations, ethnography), whether qualitative or mixed (including quantitative data). Its overarching objective is to make visible lives, places, and biographies, highlighting how labour, migration, gender, and violence intersect in individual strategies, forms of adaptation, and everyday resistance to war-induced constraints.

Organizing team:

• Sabine von Löwis (ZOIS)
• Nathalie Moine (CMB)
• Fabien Théofilakis (CMB)
• Susann Worschech (KIU Competence Network Interdisciplinary Ukrainian Studies Frankfurt (Oder) – Berlin)
• Tatiana Zhurzhenko (ZOIS)