Doing research in contexts ravaged by conflict is not easy. Doing it in a way that is respectful of the research participants’ agency, non-extractivist and sensitive to the often delicate and rapidly shifting social and political situation, is yet more difficult.

How to do it? My answer – building on over a decade of conducting research in conflict-affecting countries from Chad, to Nigeria, to Lebanon and recent extensive fieldwork in Colombia – is: a feminist methodology.

But what does having a feminist approach to research in a (post-)conflict country mean in practice? On 1-2 October 2024, a group of feminist activists and researchers met in the rooms of the Geneva Graduate Institute to answer precisely this question. We came together – hailing from Ukraine, Bosnia, Canada and Switzerland – to talk about a project we had embarked on: Caring to Survive, Surviving to Care: Gendered survival practices, social reproduction and circuits of violence in Ukraine, supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation under its Solution-Oriented Research for Development programme.

The project aims to bring to light the everyday strategies that diverse Ukrainians have adopted to survive the different, layered and intersecting types of violence they have experienced both before and after the full-scale Russian invasion in 2022. We want to explore in particular the often hidden and invisible daily work of caring for and sustaining individuals and communities that is necessary for survival. 

Ukraine is a complex context to study survival and (post-)war recovery. For one thing, the conflict is still very much ongoing and affecting the lives of Ukrainians across the country on a daily basis. There is also a lot of complexity in the violence Ukrainians have faced and continue to face. Physical violence has intersected with psychological and emotional burdens created by the war, as well as the structural violence unleashed by austerity policies, which the government has been implementing since 2014, but which have taken on additional impetus in the light of the 2022 invasion and the recovery efforts and discussions that ensued. 

We want to use the project to shed light on the intersecting realities of violence in the context of Ukraine, but also – especially – on the different ways people in Ukraine have responded to them, including through their everyday practices of care. We want to explore the role social reproduction labour has played in surviving the war and (post-)war recovery in Ukraine – and, indeed, how reconstruction policies can better account for this often unpaid and invisibilized labour.

In order to do it, we carefully designed an innovative participatory action research framework and a methodology for a research that is collaborative, inclusive and rooted in the values of care and non-extractivism.

Two of our team members: Yuliia Soroka and Nina Potarska discussed our feminist approach to non-extractivist research during the recent RUTA Conference held in the Carpathian Mountains in Ukraine in June 2024. As part of the conference, we convened a roundtable to discuss what socially responsible, non-extractivist research could look like in the specific contexts of the regions covered by the conference – Central, South-Eastern, and Eastern Europe, Baltic, Caucasus, and Central and Northern Asia. While very different, all of these regions share some post-Soviet legacies, as well as the fact that their experiences have to a certain extent been made less visible in mainstream research. The conference, thus, sought to “reclaim the process of knowledge-making in and about the region(s) and place the region(s) at the centre of epistemic debates.” In our roundtable, we proposed feminist methodologies as pathways to such reclaiming.

Speaking alongside Mila O’Sullivan of the Centre for Global Political Economy, and Yuliya Yurchenko from Greenwich University, Yuliia and Nina brought in the perspectives from our own discussions and preparations for the research project, which was inaugurated only two months before the conference was held. In particular, they outlined the innovative methodological framework we developed to operationalize feminist epistemologies and participatory research methods in a project exploring survival practices in a (post-)war context. From co-creating the research project with a group of Ukrainian academics and activists, through planning for a range of open-ended and participatory methodologies, including the use of narrative interviews, PhotoVoice methods and pre-figuration workshops, we explored different creative ways, in which diverse voices can be brought into research in meaningful ways – despite the limitations of working in a (post-)war environment. 

Our commitment to working in an inclusive and participatory way means that we find ways for team members to come together in person regularly to discuss the direction for the research. The two-day methodology workshop we held in October in Geneva was one of such opportunities. Our research team came together to co-create the research tools and further discuss the challenges and limitations faced by our feminist and participatory approach in the specific context of Ukraine. While we were able to achieve a lot, the meeting also left us with a question:

What does it mean to take a feminist and participatory approach to research in the context of an ongoing war?

There are many limitations – from the difficulties of reaching people and remaining in touch with them in a way required to forge meaningful relationships beyond a one-off interview, to the challenges of convening the diverse Ukrainians with whom we have been working and who are dispersed across the country and, indeed, the world. At the same time, avoiding extractivism is perhaps even more important in the context of war and (post-)war reconstruction.

So, we push forward, always centering the agency and expertise of those we research, and finding creative ways to meaningfully involve them at all stages of the project. We hope the methodological innovations developed through the project will be an important contribution – alongside our findings on the role of social reproduction in (post-)conflict recovery. The tools to research in a caring, thoughtful and feminist way – especially in (post-)war contexts – are still under-developed, to say the least. Building on our team’s experiences of researching in Bosnia, Colombia, Ukraine, and around the world, we hope to bring in some innovative tools and make it clear that – while not easy – feminist and non-extractivist research is possible, even in the toughest of circumstances.

Eight months after the project’s start in March 2024, things are moving forward fast. We have completed a first round of policy review and analysis and are set to begin the field research towards the end of 2024. We also have several publications lined up – and hope to continue to lead the conversation on feminist methodological approaches in different spaces. So stay tuned for more news from us!

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Research project Caring to Survive, Surviving to Care: Gendered survival practices, social reproduction and circuits of violence in Ukraine