On Canada Day, we presented the results of the NoW (Narratives of War) joint project by Lesya Ukrainka Volyn National University and McMaster University. The project has been running since Russia’s full-scale war against Ukraine began. The project resulted in designing a bilingual (Ukrainian and English) war testimonies virtual exhibit publicly available at http://now.omeka.net. The exposition of testimonies created by a joint research team from Lesya Ukrainka and McMaster Universities, presents the time of their creation and geography – the oblasts where the witnesses live.
Professors Larysa and Serhii Zasiekin are project coordinators from the Ukrainian University. Victor Kuperman, professor and head of the Reading Research Laboratory at the Center for Advanced Research in Experimental and Applied Linguistics (ARiEAL), is a coordinator from the Canadian University. The collaborators presented the project at McMaster University (Hamilton, Canada), with which our University signed a cooperation agreement a year ago. The researchers and the public from the Ontario province attended the presentation on June 29, 2023.
The Canadian ARiEAL Center works closely with the Ukrainian Center for Psychotrauma at Volyn University, whose mission is to conduct research and implement psychological interventions to work with collective and individual trauma. The Ukrainian Center has archives of interviews with witnesses and descendants of the Holocaust and the Holodomor. The transcribed texts serve as materials for interdisciplinary research in psychology, linguistics, history, law, and genocide studies.
The current project is significant, as the voices of Ukrainians about the events in Ukraine today will be heard globally and testify to the crimes against humanity committed by Russia. Our sincerest gratitude goes to all the war witnesses who shared their experiences of these events. The collective trauma can only be healed if there is social justice and broad public recognition of these crimes by the entire civilized community. Each testimony makes its own small but vital contribution to spreading the truth about these bloody events and informs the world about the terrible consequences of the war.
The project has been completed, but the work continues. The exposition will be updated with new materials and will gradually turn from a virtual exhibit into a virtual library of testimonies of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
Larysa and Serhii Zasiekin