Embedded Files
Sites of fieldwork (2023-2025). Each dot is one interview, exact locaitons are anonymized.
Methodology
I am a mixed-methods researcher. In my work, I integrate quantitative analysis and extensive fieldwork, including in-depth interviews and ethnographic observations, and let what I learn in the field shape how I use and define concepts, operationalize measures, and trace the mechanisms behind the effects I estimate.
This approach is motivated by the question of translation that I often grapple with: what happens when concepts and measurement tools that are built in one methodological tradition, time, or place are transplanted to another? I am drawn to the gaps between how scholars theorize a problem and how the people living through it make sense of it, and I aim to build concepts and measures that take those gaps seriously.
My dissertation builds on this approach, asking how war transforms national communities from below. Studying the case of the Russo-Ukrainian war, I show that wartime victimization strengthens national identity, that unequal sacrifice redraws the boundaries of the national in-group, and that these shifts can spark grassroots action that later shapes institutions. I conceptualize wartime contribution as a central mechanism that operates horizontally, through which the unequal burdens and demands of war become a new basis for national belonging and political authority. The project draws on original datasets, combining quantitative causal approaches with insights from extensive fieldwork, which shapes both the central concept and design of my experiments.
Fieldwork in conflict settings
During a one of my interviews that turned into a long walk with a war veteran V., after some hesitation, as I understood in retrospect, he brought me to the square pictured in the image to the right. This is a memorial site in one of the Ukrainian Western cities with over 600 portraits and short bios of city's fallen soldiers. His jolly, buoyant tales of war turned quieter and more reflective to stories about the men who were his brothers-in-arms. Taking me from one stand to the next, he stopped at each of his friends and told me who they had been, where they came from, why they joined, and how their paths in the war ended. Moments like this capture the unpredictability, intimacy, and human dimension of field work and where the challenge and researcher's responsibility lie when conducting fieldwork with people who have borne burdens and demands of war.
As was the case for my interview with V., researchers are often among the first people to whom combatants, civilians, or bereaved families speak openly about what they have been through. As Elizabeth Wood reflects on her fieldwork in El Salvador, people living through war have a real need to talk -- to have their stories heard and recorded. Yet this trust and openness with which respondents may approach researchers should be met by researchers with reflection about their own positionality and responsibility to the conversation partners. Lee Ann Fujii further emphasized that consent to talk may mean many things and is not contained to securing IRB-approved agreement from individuals. Sometimes, when agreeing to an interview, people may not even know how the conversation might turn out or what it may stir up. No IRB approval process can prepare a researcher for this. These questions have to be centered in every interview and will most surely extend beyond it into the data interpretation stage.
For my work in the field, this meant two things: reflecting my own positionality as a Ukrainian native but also a researcher from abroad and approaching my interviews with care towards trust and responsibility that my respondents placed in me by securing genuine consent, to let my conversation partners set the tone and pace as well as limits of what they share, to avoid reopening wounds for the sake of gathering data, and to stay accountable to participants after the interview ends.
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If you are preparing for fieldwork, reflecting on your own experiences, or are just curious to read more, here some great resources that helped me conduct and process my own fieldwork: this is a classic piece by Wood on ethics of research in conflict zones, Cronin-Furman and Lake do great job highlighting the power imbalance between researchers and respondents when working with vulnerable populations, Fujii talks about taking care of your respondents. Listening to stories of loss and trauma also inevitably takes toll on the listener and this should be taken seriously -- Schulz et al. beautifully point out that taking care of yourself extends beyond "bubble baths and chocolate pralines"; it requires relationships, communities, and institutions.
Remember the fallen, thank the living.
Nationwide minute of silence, everyday at 9 am.
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