The event series “Memory under Fire” focuses on data and archiving practices in times of war and conflict. With Ukraine as a focal point, we explore the dynamics of information disorder in our platform saturated media sphere. Russia’s full scale invasion of Ukraine has brought innumerable deaths and destruction in the physical sphere, and Russia’s aggression also continues in the digital space, where countless pieces of disinformation, hate speech and propaganda are spread. Additionally, the digital media dynamics of this war have been put front and centre: some call it ‘the first TikTok war’, others argue that Volodimir Zelenskiy and his country invented new ways to fight on the digital battlefield. Russia’s invasion and the ensuing ongoing war highlights both digital warfare and the many data practices that participate in, critique, document, and archive this war.

This current situation sheds light on the need to document and archive war experiences and war crimes for future researchers and generations. This is particularly relevant for both countering disinformation practices and preserving data and access to it digitally, when physical archival infrastructures are being destroyed.

For our event series, we host speakers from the fields of academia and praxis (e.g. Center for Urban History in Lviv, Bellingcat, Mnemonic, University of Amsterdam, Simon Fraser University, Underdog the Unlawyers and other institutions and fields of praxis) to discuss how this war is influenced by and changing our digital media sphere.

The second event “Archiving in Times of Crisis: Practitioners‘ Perspectives” on June 13^th focuses on archiving war and human rights violations from the critical data practice perspectives in the fields of journalism and NGOs. We will host Charlotte Godart, investigator and lead of the Global Authentication Project at Bellingcat, Dia Kayyali, Associate Director of Advocacy at Mnemonic, and Olga Lubiv, Analyst at Underdog the Unlawyers, Kyiv, Ukraine.