Ukrainian Researchers in a War Documentation Project: Intertwined Experiences and Methodologies

This article covers the experiences of an interdisciplinary team of researchers, most of whom were internally displaced scholars, in one of the projects documenting the Russian war in Ukraine. It reflects on this initiative from different professional and institutional perspectives and reveals the interrelation and mutual influence of researchers’ embodied experiences, the logic of team organization, and the methodological decisions undertaken. The case of our initiative shows the inherent tension between different temporalities within war documentation projects: interaction with the witness here-and-now and archiving for the future. It outlines the specifics of the institutional setting and how it shaped the war documentation project. The article also focuses on the role of the body and how it was reflected during psychological supervision, both from the point of view of group therapy for researchers and from the development of sensitivity in interaction with narrators.