The first offline meeting of Ukrainian and international documentation initiatives – the Forum of Oral History of Ukraine – will occur on October 10, 2023 in Kyiv. The Forum is an initiative of the Museum of Civilian Voices of the Rinat Akhmetov Foundation, which has been documenting first-person testimonies of civilians about the war for more than five years and has already collected more than 85,000 testimonies.

Three discussion panels are planned as part of the Forum, during which participants will discuss various aspects of documenting war experiences.

One of the discussions will be regarding the topic "Oral history: tasks, roles, problems".

The speakers of the discussion will be:

— Janine di Giovanni – war correspondent, writer, co-founder and executive director of The Reckoning Project, which documents Russian war crimes in Ukraine (online);
— Katya Taylor – curator, manager of cultural projects, founder of the NGO "Port of Culture", author of the book "Management and Marketing of Culture".
— Natalia Yemchenko — Chief Reputation Officer at SCM, member of the supervisory board of the Rinat Akhmetov Foundation, member of the supervisory boards of Mariupol. Reborn and "Heart of Azovstal" projects.*

*The list of speakers is being updated.

The speakers of the discussion panel

The discussion will be moderated by Yuliia Manukian, journalist, editor, researcher, co-founder of the NGO Urban Republic (Kherson), curator, editor of the cultural publication "СОYС" and winner of the Vaclav Havel International Prize (2023).

During the discussion panel, the following questions will be covered:

— roles and functions of oral history projects during the war;
— approaches to documentation of war experiences, peculiarities of methodology;
— problems and pain points during the documentation of war experiences;
— Ukrainian experience: its role and significance for global documentation practices.

The Forum will be held in partnership with the USC Shoah Foundation and the Oral History Association, with the support of the Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv and the Maria Curie-Sklodowska University (Lublin).

Participation in the Forum is free and possible with prior registration and confirmation from the hosts. Registration is available at https://forms.gle/ and is open until October 8, 2023.

For press accreditation issues, please contact Olha Nosyk at onosyk@fdu.org.ua.

For registration and additional questions, contact Volodymyr Kapustin at forum@fdu.org.ua.

Follow the news of the Forum on its Facebook page and on the website of Museum of Civilian Voices