The rationale for this session lies in the unprecedented scale and diversity of wartime cultural production in Ukraine since 2014, and especially following the full-scale invasion of 2022. Diaries, oral testimonies, drone footage, poetry, and social media videos circulate across platforms and languages, generating vast and heterogeneous archives that challenge traditional methods of analysis. At the same time, emerging forms of mediation, such as computational modeling, platform-native video, and collaborative translation, reshape how war is experienced both locally and globally.
The panel engages and extends existing scholarship in Slavic studies, memory and media studies, and digital humanities. It builds on foundational work on war literature and testimony while contributing to recent debates on digital archives, platform-mediated literary creation, and the circulation of cultural production in times of crisis. By juxtaposing computational analysis, visual media theory, translation practices, and social media archiving, the session intervenes in discussions about the relationship between individual experience and collective memory, as well as the ethical implications of scaling, preserving, and circulating representations of violence.
The session is designed for a 75-minute format. Each paper will be allocated 12 minutes, totaling approximately 50 minutes of presentations, followed by at least 25 minutes of the unstructured discussion. This format allows for collective reflection on methodological, ethical, and political questions raised across the papers.
The first paper, “War Diaries in Ukraine: 2015–2025,” develops a large-scale digital corpus of wartime narratives, including printed diaries, oral testimonies, and social media posts. By distinguishing between combatant and non-combatant accounts, the project analyzes how proximity to violence shapes narrative form, emotional expression, and attitudes toward the enemy. Using computational methods, it identifies temporal and geographic patterns in language use and traces evolving discursive frameworks, offering new insights into how social memory emerges from a multiplicity of individual experiences.
The second paper, “Screening the Third Drone Age: FPV Killcams, Violent Mediation, and Telegram’s Spectator War,” examines the visual culture of drone warfare, focusing on the circulation of FPV drone footage on Telegram. It argues that such video constitutes a new scopic regime in which viewers are positioned within the targeting apparatus itself. Through the concept of “violent mediation,” the paper shows how drone footage is transformed into consumable media, reshaping perception, embodiment, and ethical distance.
The third paper, “Justice in Translation: A Poetry Archive for Conflict Zones,” presents the Contemporary Ukrainian Poetry Archive, an online collection of poems circulated on social media since 2014. Combining collaborative translation, digital archiving, and computational analysis, the project highlights how poetry functions as a cultural response to war and as a medium through which experiences of conflict are translated for global audiences, raising questions about justice, representation, and accessibility.
The fourth paper, “Poetry Finds Life on Ukrainian TikTok During War: Creating the Archive,” focuses on the preservation of poetry videos shared on TikTok. By scraping and archiving videos and their metadata, the project constructs a database that preserves these ephemeral works as both cultural artifacts and documentary testimony. The paper demonstrates how social media poetry functions simultaneously as artistic production and historical record, while also reflecting on the methodological challenges of archiving platform-dependent content and proposing approaches for analyzing these hybrid audiovisual texts.
Together, these papers demonstrate how war is simultaneously scaled through data, screened through visual media, translated across languages, and archived through digital infrastructures, producing new forms of knowledge and affect. The panel highlights the urgency of interdisciplinary frameworks capable of addressing the complexity of contemporary warfare and its representations.
Finally, the panel reflects a commitment to diversity in disciplinary training, methodology, and perspective. It brings together American, Russian, Belarusian, and Ukrainian scholars working across literary studies, digital humanities, media theory, and translation studies. This diversity ensures a nuanced and multifaceted discussion of how war is experienced, mediated, and preserved across different contexts and audiences.