CBEES Distinguished Lecture: Challenges of Knowledge Production in the War-Torn Society:

Studies and Policies for Peace Restoration in Ukraine |
Sociologist Viktoriya Sereda invites us to explore how locally rooted knowledge shapes research on war‑affected regions and how such insights move between academia, policy, and public debate.

About

Critical approaches to research on war-torn societies emphasise the necessity for a more empirically grounded approach to the production of knowledge, as these approaches contribute to both policy-oriented and problem-solving discourses. Presently, research on war-torn societies is undergoing a shift towards ‘localisation’ with a call for more ‘voices’ with local knowledge and expertise. A move towards the localisation of fieldwork requires a more sensitive and transdisciplinary approach to knowledge production and raises many additional questions. This talk aims to analyse the challenges of reliable knowledge production in war-torn societies and their circulation in academia, the policy-making community, and the media discourse.

Format

On-site and online (obligatory registration)

Bio

Viktoriya Sereda is a sociologist, Academic Director of the Virtual Ukraine Institute for Advanced Studies at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, and professor of sociology at the Kyiv School of Economics. In 2022-25 she was a director of the project “Prisma Ukraïna: War, Migration and Memory” of the Forum Transregionale Studien. She is an associate of the Ukrainian Research Institute at Harvard University.

In 2021, she was the URIS visiting lecturer at the University of Basel. From 2011 to 2017, she was the head of the sociological team for the project “Region, Nation and Beyond: An Interdisciplinary and Transcultural Reconceptualization of Ukraine”, organized by the University of St. Gallen in Switzerland.

In 2016-20, she recurrently was a Research Fellow at the Ukrainian Research Institute at Harvard University, where she developed a digital atlas of social changes in Ukraine after the Euromaidan.