Working Lives in War-Time Ukraine

Shifting Geographies, Vulnerabilities, Resistance

22.04.2026
9:00 – 17:45

Germaine Tillion Saal (7th floor) - Centre Marc Bloch, Friedrichstraße 191, 10117 Berlin & Online

Four years after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, this workshop examines how war has reshaped work, livelihoods, and social trajectories. It explores the effects of violence, displacement, mobilization, and destruction on everyday working lives, economic geography, and labor markets, as well as the emergence of new vulnerabilities and gendered transformations.

Focusing on under-studied sectors and skill-based social groups (e.g. agriculture, care, transport, industry, public services), the workshop also addresses diverse forms of mobility, from internal displacement to transnational migration, including those who remain in threatened areas.

Covering the period from 2014 to the present, with particular attention to developments since 2022, it adopts a multi-scalar perspective across front-line, occupied, and rear regions, as well as transnational spaces.

Organized by the Centre Marc Bloch (Berlin), ZOiS, and KIU, the workshop fosters interdisciplinary dialogue and connects research on Ukraine to broader debates on war, labor, migration, and democracy in Europe. It prioritizes fieldwork-based research and aims to highlight how labor, migration, gender, and violence intersect in everyday strategies and forms of resilience.

Organizing Team: Sabine von Löwis (ZOIS), Nathalie Moine (CMB), Fabien Théofilakis (CMB), Susann Worschech (KIU Competence Network Interdisciplinary Ukrainian Studies Frankfurt (Oder) – Berlin), Tatiana Zhurzhenko (ZOIS)

♦ Registration ♦

Programm

Workshop : 9:00 – 17:45

9:00–9:30 Welcome & Introduction

9:30–11:00 Panel 1: Shifting Geographies

Daria Malchykova (Kherson): Demographic Hollowing and multiple stressors of the labour market in front-line de-occupied regions

Inna Semenenko (Kyiv): War-induced business relocations: success factors, failures, and local government support

Sophie Pinedo-Padoch (Halle): Zirochka: an ethnographic portrait of building during wartime

Chair: Sabine von Löwis (ZOIS)

11:00–11:15 Coffee Break

11:15–12:45 Panel 2: To Stay or To Go

Sbigniew Szmyt (Poznan): Housing-Work Nexus in Wartime: Private Hosting and the Labour Incorporation of Ukrainian Refugees in Provincial Poland

Nataliia Zaika (Kyiv): Staying Under Fire: Working-Age Women’s Motivations to Stay in Ukraine During the War

Richard Pettifer (Berlin): Precarious Acceleration: Cultural Labour through the Full-scale invasion

Chair: Lidia Kuzemska (Forum Transregionale Studien)

12:45–13:45 Lunch

13:45–15:30 Panel 3: Socioecological Transformations and Critical Professions Under Fire

Iryna Zamuruieva (Oxford): A figure of a farmer: exploring the agronomic, entrepreneurial and manual labour it takes to grow rapeseed in war-time Ukraine

Milena Komar (Kyiv): The Green Transition’s Missing Workers: Human Capital Crisis in Ukraine’s Wartime Renewable Energy Sector

Kateryna Filonova (Lviv): Professional Identities, Social Recognition, and Institutional Loyalty among Ukraine’s Critical Infrastructure Workers

Sophie Lambroschini (Paris): Repairing pipes and society at war. How the ‘golden hands’ of Ukraine’s infrastructure workers connect hardware, the commons and the state in wartime liminality

Chair: Benjamin Beuerle (CMB)

15:30–15:45 Coffee break

15:45–17:15 Panel 4: War-related Vulnerabilities and Resistance

Viktoria Naumenko (Hagen): Between “Before” and “After”: Continuity and Interruption of Work under Occupation (case Vilcha village, Kharkiv region)

Daryna Korkach (Kyiv): Invisible Shifts: Women’s Care Work and Wartime Labour in Ukraine since 2022

Inha Kozlova (Lviv): Returning to Civilian Life: Employment Challenges and Pathways for Ukrainian Veterans (online)

Chair: Simon Schlegel (LibMod)

17:15 – 17:45 Final discussion & outlook

18:00 – 19:30 The workshop will be followed by a roundtable discussion with German and Ukrainian journalists : How to inform on Ukrainian Lives in Front-Line and occupied areas (Chair: Susann Worschech, KIU)