The art of mapping whirlwinds: challenges and opportunities of documenting inequality amidst the Russo-Ukrainian war
How important is it to tell the story of Ukrainians as a nation at war without losing sight of individual tragedies, losses, love, joy, heartbreak, destitution, despair, and resistance against all odds? Do individual stories matter when the world order falls apart? Imperialisms, old and new, require and rely on the erasure of people and peoples, their lives and tragedies, trampling them into the foundation and mythology of empires lest they fall.
As social scientists trained in approaches developed to produce data necessary for imperial and status quo (re)production - a very specific kind of knowledge - we face these dilemmas regularly and have some tricks as to how they can be overcome, most frequently by cutting off whatever is inconvenient, incomplete, too unquantifiable, too human and emotional; as if humans are not just that - complex, emotional, irrational, incomplete and over the top at the same time, and aren’t social sciences about society, about those humans? What value is that science if it's lost sight of its subjects in the process of becoming science? Of whom is that science as a result? Who and what does it serve?
Recognising that destruction of people and nature, genocides and ecocides, are the essence of empires and that professionalised knowledge production, as it evolved in the imperial metropoles and universities, has been at the service of that destruction, is a good place to start producing knowledge that is de-colonial and anti-imperial. This must involve questioning existing methodologies, techniques, protocols, preconceptions, metrics, and measurement techniques without automatic abandonment, but with a critical eye, keeping what is useful, improving, or leaving behind what is not.
In my work, I try not to lose sight of the human in all its complexity and of its circumstance - from the natural environment in which they live, to the physical environment and institutions in which they operate and which condition the current of their everyday life, availability or erasure of choices and paths. It may sound complex and impossible, and in some ways it certainly is. But that shall not discourage one from trying. When I teach my students about methods, I tell them that too, and they are mainly economists - students of a social science often robbed of its social origin, so far in imitation of "hard" sciences, mathematics in particular, that it leaves little space for the irregular regularity of humans whose lives, past and future, it studies.
What can a story of one person tell us about how the whole economy works? I have learned that it is possible to see the big picture through snippets of individual stories, that it is of paramount importance that we do, that we challenge the cold (if necessary) scepticism of scholarly protocols, and get creative with evidence and its lack, where gaps often scream louder than that which is documented.
A young woman, 20, became mentally and physically sick after she was raped, with no permanent housing or ability to work as a result, and is now indebted by medical costs. A 60-year-old woman miraculously survived shelling in Konstyantynivka in 2022, lost her home, is displaced and living in Cherkasy, sick with a rare autoimmune disease, and is a carer for a disabled daughter. A woman lost her husband while pregnant with her third child, struggles to make ends meet, or budget for winter shoes for her children on meagre social support payment, while unable to work full-time. What do they have in common? What bigger story do the snippets of these difficult lives tell us besides them seeking the kindness of strangers, donating on a woman-to-woman crowdfunding page? We know they are impoverished by circumstance. We know that the systems within which they function fail to meet their regular – housing, healthcare, social welfare - and irregular – displacement, extreme injury - needs. What good is an economy that fails these women? And what needs to happen for it not to fail these women, their friends and neighbours, veterans, and returning prisoners of war seeking a stable place in a society they call home? Should that not be a concern of economics, government policies, budgets - national & municipal, a topic of national conversation that puts the needs of its constituent parts, humans, centre stage?
Photos are part of a visual project by INDEX's Veteran Resident Alina Sarnatska, which was exhibited at the Centre for Urban Mobility in Lviv (by Halyna Brulova). The hands pictured here belong to homeless women, and in the exhibition, they were accompanied by photos of sparrows, symbolising two species that depend on society.
Those are the questions I ask myself in my work of documenting inequality in Ukraine, pre-war and in-war. Seeing the big picture of economy and society at war through the presence of individual stories of hardship, oscillating between the levels of individual, community, region, country, as well as seeing that our country is part of a wider world with national commitments, debts, pressures, and demands on domestic politicians and policies. For example, the reasons behind the absence of a state-provided housing programme in Ukraine become clearer when one knows the conditions of loans issued by the IMF and market preference conditions i.e., mortgages over municipal housing, as part of the EU accession process, combined with the neoliberal market-obsessed agenda of mainstream politicians in Ukraine.
Caring for the population is not even considered a priority for the state’s functioning, not even on the level of imagination. Once we see that, we can work to address this as a socially destructive approach.
The period of the Russo-Ukrainian war, one would think, should offer plenty of evidence to work with, as it is the most documented war to date, and yet, not all is as simple: we are often told we need more evidence, that there is not enough data and that what is available is patchy, methodologically inconsistent as the content of categories keeps changing, e.g. demographic data for concrete locations varies from month to month as people live across countries, change multiple locations in the same year and effectively people’s residence and location data is fluid. So do we need more evidence or more action? Have we, in chasing methodological purity, lost sight of the declared purpose of social research in the 21st century: understanding and improving social conditions? How and what do we document, and how do we make individual, household, community, city, country, and international levels align and tell a comprehensive, scientifically rigorous, and convincing story? What do these challenges tell us about science as a body of evidence and methods used to produce the object and subject of scientific evidence? What of the object and subject of analytical units of data? What opportunities are opened by the unavailability of what is by now standard and conventional, which forces us to seek alternative, creative solutions? Society as an object of study, its agent components fill the discourse space with stories which are often difficult to systematise meaningfully in a quantitative way. Perhaps this forced shift of focus spotlights what was there before, neglected, overlooked, deemed unimportant, unscientific, unquantifiable, and often, as a result of that, insignificant? Research ethics and H&S protocols, well-intentioned and aimed at protecting researchers and subjects, borrowed from medical and natural sciences, were always an odd fit in social sciences, where the notion of harm prevention and reduction alike takes on much broader meanings and consequences than in pharmaceutical or physics tests. The ideology and the political economy of data collection, epistemically hierarchical knowledge production, political instrumentalisation, and significance assigned to findings, not on the basis of social significance or popular demand, but in line with the funders’ preferences – all get starkly revealed in the whirlwinds spun by the war.
Photos of sparrows by Volodymyr Nevmerzhytskyi, Andriy Suran, Iryna Medvedeva
So how do we document complex phenomena while in a whirlwind of data, its fragments, and its gaps? Fear not getting creative with ways of enhancing credibility and validity of stories by combining multiple methods, data sources, theories on the level of analysis, and interdisciplinarity. Open-minded evidence gathering and arrangement are demanded by the reality around us - the main task is to do justice to the situation and the object of study in the first instance, because following technical rule only matters if it helps and is always secondary to the purpose of research i.e., a positive contribution to the knowledge of people and nature and structures in which those happen. Do not be constrained by methodological approaches designed for peacetime work on big budgets: listen to the stories, identify the needs unmet, fight for those who are to be addressed, and help make Ukraine, for which we are fighting, happen. Social research must aim to matter and make a positive change in the societies it studies. Otherwise, what use is it?
Whirlwinds are terrifying yet are highly effective in getting rid of old dust and cobwebs.