Contribution short abstract:

This paper explores the ethical hazards and scholarly opportunities in researching Ukrainian youth values during wartime. Special attention is given to how oral history methods can both enhance or restrict youth agency, which requires nuanced approaches and contextualization.

Contribution long abstract:

This paper reports on a collaborative oral history project between Adelphi University (US) and the National Academy of Pedagogical Sciences of Ukraine, Institute of Problems of Education. It first explores how researchers can tackle the ethical challenges of “crisis” research, foregrounding oral history methods. There has been an expansion of conducting oral history during crises, yet there remains a gap in the literature on the best practices and specific methods. Some practitioners adopt a more perilous framework that casts oral history as “cathartic but not therapy.” Others adhere to strict research designs to document people’s subjective experience for historical preservation. This paper examines: Is there an ethical middle ground between reaching for cathartic release alongside rigorous methodology for the collection narrators’ memories? If so, what methodologies, training and supports are needed to collect testimony in a crisis environment? How exactly can a research design guard against the risk of re-traumatization of narrators? Should researchers bear witness or uncover the ways in which youth construct meaning beyond the trauma-resilience narrative? These questions are investigated in the context the strengths and limitations of the project’s use of a Charmazian-constructivist grounded theory coding system, which was employed to evaluate analytical categories related to civic values, agency and resilience among Ukrainian high school students and teachers during the acute phase of war.