March 31-April 1, 2026

Online

Deadline: March 29, 2026

Registration: To register, please send a short email to warsensing@europa-uni.de by 29 March, expressing your interest to join the public programme.

Event description:

As part of an ongoing collaboration between the “War Sensing” project (European University Viadrina/CRC “Media of Cooperation”) , the Telegram Archive of the War (Center for Urban History, Lviv) and the School of Communications/Conflict Institute (Dublin City University), we are organising a 1,5 day conference and online data sprint “Witnessing and Justice in Data-Based Research”, which is scheduled for 31 March-1 April.

The conference and data sprint will reflect upon the practices and limits of war-related research based on digital, archived and other types of data. The urgent question here is how to address the ongoing tension between such data-based research of war and the injustices that persist. Despite the large volume of data and the variety of ways in which Russia’s war in Ukraine has been documented, represented and analysed in order to expose its unjust nature and practices, the destruction and attacks against Ukraine persist. Data-based investigations using “data for the good” (cf. Williams, 2022; Kazansky et al., 2019) form a small part of achieving transitional justice and maintain hope and demand accountability by using digitally derived evidence of war injustices and crimes. (How) do digital data archives and data-based investigations continue to counter war-related injustices, and what approaches have proved as successful? What are the various limitations of digital data-based witnessing of war in terms of experiential, juridical, political and other nature? How can the tension between the investigations and ongoing injustices tell us about the role and impact of contemporary war witnessing?  

The event consists of two sessions that are open for the general public. The first open session takes place on the morning of 31 March and features a keynote talk by Oksana Avramenko "Granting Access to War: Ethics and Accountability in the TG Archive", followed by a roundtable discussion "Limits of War Witnessing" with Jelnar Ahmad, Karina Buhaichenko, Yevheniia Drozdova, Oleksiy Radynski and Bohdan Shumylovych. 

The second session, which is also open to the public, will take place in the evening on 1 April and will consist of a roundtable discussion on "Digital Justice and Accountability" with Jenna Dolecek, Kaja Kowalczewska and Maryna Slobodyanuk. This will be followed by a screening of the film “A Home for Rita”, after which there will be a Q&A session with the director, Yulia Appen, and Sashko Protyah from the Freefilmers collective.

The event will also consist of a half-day closed data sprint on 31 March, during which participants from the previous data sprint will discuss their ongoing hands-on work with the Telegram Archive’s data. Due to the sensitive and ongoing nature of the research, this part will only be open to previous data sprint participants. 

The detailed event programme can be found on the event page here. The final programme, including the Zoom links, will be sent to registered participants. 

To register, please send a short email to warsensing@europa-uni.de by 29 March, expressing your interest to join the public programme.

On behalf of the CRC Media of Cooperation and the project teams “War Sensing” (European University Viadrina, Frankfurt (Oder) with Prof. Dr. Miglė Bareikytė, Johanna Hiebl and Gregor Wörl, the Telegram Archive of the War (Center for Urban History, Lviv) with Oksana Avramenko and Maryana Mazurak and School of Communication (Dublin City University) with Prof. Dr. Tanya Lokot