Introduction: What's it all about.

Welcome to Memory Matters, a research blog shadowing my PhD activities at Baltic and East European Graduate School in Södertörn University.
My name is Yuliya Yurchuk. I am a PhD candidate affiliated to two universities: Södertörn and Stockholm but most of time I spend in the Södertörn academic environment.
Now I am in the middle of my PhD route, all the courses are now finished and the time left I can dedicate to writing (and perhaps teaching).
Generally, my research is embedded into a broader field of memory studies that means that in my dissertation I am not trying to uncover historical truth, what I am aiming to do is to scrutinize the representations of the past and their effects on the present and future. In this way, the kind of history I am dealing with is mnemohistory.
My main research interest is the representations of WWII in the post-Soviet states. Fully understanding the immense scope of this topic, on the one hand, and limitations of the PhD dissertation, on the other hand, in my thesis I decided to focus only on one country, which is Ukraine, and on the narrower episode of that time – the activities of nationalist organizations in Western Ukraine.
The preliminary title of my dissertation is “Between the hammer of remembering and the anvil of forgetting: representations of history in Ukraine since 1991”. I focus mainly on the representations of history of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and Ukrainian Insurgent Army (better known by its Ukrainian acronym UPA- Українська Повстанська Армія). While this history was silenced and misrepresented during the Soviet time, there are traces of new mythologization nowadays. I am mostly interested in interaction between various actors who are involved into the memory work – officials, intellectuals, parties, activists and ‘common’ people. I focus on the actors and processes that set frameworks for official remembering as well as look at the grassroots where (spontaneous) remembering take place. I want to see how people on local and regional levels work through this past and how they use it in performing and forming their individual and collective identities. In short, I am not dealing with first-hand memories of the people who were involved in the OUN or UPA (although I extensively refer to memoirs and archival materials), what I am dealing with is post-memories (to borrow Hirsch’s term) of subsequent generations. On the one hand, these memories are now struggling with each other for the right to become a cultural memory of the nation, to use Assmanns’ terminology.
Key questions in my dissertation are: Which and whose memories are thematised and promoted as ‘national’? What meaning is ascribed to national identity through framing of national historical narrative? What do the new ways of remembering tell us about national identity formation? What political messages they transmit? Which memories and why are activated for remembrance and which are forced out from the memory space?
Speaking about my material, from the very beginning of my dissertation plan I considered focusing on memories represented in monuments, literature, films, blogs, and popular culture. Now, I have several papers based almost on each of these sets of materials separately, still I feel as if standing on the crossroads, not sure whether I will include all of these pieces into the dissertation. Maybe I will leave only monuments at the end because they give quite a broad insight on the processes and actors involved in memory work as well as they reveal the particularities of memory, remembering and representations of history in the post-Soviet Ukraine.
I don’t have a clear explanation why I felt like starting this blog, perhaps I am doing this because I’ve been blogging so much I want finally to separate dissertation related issues from all the other things I am usually writing about. Or, perhaps I wanted to broaden the circle of discussion and find people who are also engaged in memory studies. Or just sort out hundreds of things rambling in my mind and articulate them in more or less coherent manner. All these reasons count, I guess. So, here I come with my Memory Matters where I will post literature reviews, impressions of filed trips, conferences, and workshops. From time to time, I will also post some random thoughts about memory and my project. Considering the fact that so many things matter it is hard to delineate now the boundaries of probable topics which will appear in my blog.
My blog is not a diary, in a strict sense of this word. By being public it loses the sense of ‘notes for myself only’. But it is not a polished final product for public use either. It reflects process of writing so none of the following pieces is a final finding whatsoever. Moreover, it reflects writing in a foreign language for me, which makes this process a bit more challenging, but very often rewarding. From my experience, it is easier to put a complicated thought into a concise English passage than into concise Ukrainian, because a high level of fluency in mother tongue easily ends up in a far too long bubbling. So, looking from this perspective, writing in English might be an advantage. But, please, do mind that English is a foreign country for me.
Besides Ukrainian and English I speak German, Russian, some Polish and some Swedish (you are welcome to address me in any of these languages, you can suggest me reading in these languages, although responding to you in Polish or Swedish might be a complicated task for me).
Comments, suggestion and discussions are very welcomed here.

Yuliya Yurchuk