In the first days of July 2025, the world leaders are gearing up for another in the series of annual Ukraine Recovery Conferences – this time to be held in Rome, Italy on 10-11 July 2025. These Conferences have become a platform where the priorities and plans for the (post-)war reconstruction in Ukraine are discussed. The previous conferences – held in Lugano, London and Berlin – have led to the development and adoption of Ukraine’s National Recovery Plan, with thematic priorities, specific targets and programs to guide investment.
At the same time, the beginning of July 2025 also saw intensified Russian attacks on Ukraine. On July 4th, Russia launched a major drone and missile attack on Kyiv, killing one and injuring at least 23 people, and forcing those living in the capital to seek shelter in metro stations yet again. In Kharkiv – where the sound of detonations has become a familiar soundtrack to the daily life – shelling continued and intensified, wounding and killing dozens, including children.
It may seem unthinkable to envisage recovery while bombs continue to fly on a daily basis and people’s everyday rhythms and routines are disrupted by air raid alerts. And yet, as cities are destroyed, health and education services disrupted, and the social fabric stretched and torn by the challenges of war and forced displacement, talking about rebuilding and recovery is inevitable – and indeed, something Ukrainians have been doing on a daily basis.
However, mainstream policy discussions around recovery have largely ignored the everyday efforts, organizing and strategies Ukrainians have employed to survive the war and other intersecting forms of violence, and to rebuild their communities. The SNF-funded project Caring to Survive, Surviving to Care: Gendered survival practices, social reproduction and circuits of violence in Ukraine seeks to bring to the light and centre everyday survival strategies and practices that diverse Ukrainians have put in place to adapt to the different forms of violence they have faced since 2014. The project pays special attention to the practices of social reproduction – the often invisible or invisibilised and unpaid or underpaid labour necessary to sustain life of individuals, families and communities.
In Ukraine, social reproduction has taken a myriad of forms – from parents finding new ways to care for their children in the absence of support networks, to sons and daughters refusing to leave occupied territories where their elderly parents still live, neighbours organizing to provide each other with food during occupation, teachers and social workers supporting those in their charge as they struggle with psychological impacts of war, volunteers organizing activities for the displaced, and many others. The project seeks to document these practices and use a deeper understanding of what survival and recovery means in the context of a war economy to inform the ongoing policy discussions around (post-)war reconstruction in Ukraine. Between January and June 2025, the project team conducted 60 narrative interviews with diverse Ukrainians in Lviv and Kharkiv.
In late June and early July 2025, the project team met in Kraków, Poland and then travelled to the West of Ukraine as part of the project. The project’s lead, Professor Elisabeth Prügl, shares her experiences from the trip in the below interview.
You lead the research project Caring to Survive, Surviving to Care: Gendered survival practices, social reproduction and circuits of violence Ukraine. Can you tell us more about the project? Are there already any findings that are emerging from it?
Feminists are concerned that women’s unpaid labour is not accounted for in economic models and that economic policies therefore tend to ignore this labour, which is crucial for securing life. We designed the project – together with our Ukrainian partners and advisors – because we were concerned that this blindness was apparent in the planning for Ukrainian reconstruction. If nothing changes, the reconstruction process in Ukraine is in danger of replicating a pattern in which the goals of growth and efficiency drown out the goal of meeting the basic needs of people. But reconstruction also provides a unique opportunity for doing things differently, for building an economy that includes the labour of caring that is so crucial to everyday survival. Our project wants to first make this labour visible; and in a second step we want to influence reconstruction and recovery plans so that they centre the needs of people and the labour of those ensuring everyday survival and healing, but also engage in building a caring and inclusive society.
It is already clear from our research that the amount of unpaid labour performed increases exponentially during war, as everyday support systems collapse. For example, displacement has severely disrupted the kin and neighbourhood networks that used to ensure childcare and elder care. Moreover, bombings have destroyed schools and forced schooling online, keeping children at home and needing to be supervised. The war has also produced remarkable acts of solidarity and volunteering; but there are signs of significant exhaustion as the violence continues. Speaking theoretically, we can say that what feminist political economists call “social reproduction” takes a specific shape during war and it is worth studying how social reproduction intersects with violence.
Another finding that is already clear from our research concerns policies. We have found some attention being paid in the Ukrainian recovery plan to the “social economy”, which is positive. But the overwhelming emphasis in how the social economy is talked about is on attracting private investments – often from abroad – and finding ways to commodify health care, education, and elder care in order to finance them. Given the problematic experiences in other countries with the privatization of welfare infrastructures, this tendency is worrisome.
Tell us more about your recent trip. What was the itinerary?
The trip was divided in three parts. We first met in Kraków with the project team – including our researchers from Ukraine, our civil society partners from both Ukraine and Geneva, and our research team from the Graduate Institute. We try to meet in person every 6-8 months to discuss the project’s progress and make sure we remain faithful to its participatory spirit by engaging in co-creation. This time, our purpose was to jointly reflect on the emerging themes from the 60 interviews the Ukraine team conducted in Kharkiv and Lviv. While we were not able to read all of the interviews before the meeting, we could already see some common threads. The workshop in Kraków provided us with the space to bring together our collective knowledge and divergent experiences to build on these findings and identify major themes to pursue in our analysis moving forward.
From Kraków, we moved to Uzhhorod – a beautiful Ukrainian town located in the Carpathian Mountains. We presented the conceptual framework of our research at the conference of the RUTA Association for Central, South-Eastern, and Eastern European, Baltic, Caucasus, Central and Northern Asian Studies. It was a great opportunity to meet more critical scholars from Ukraine and the broader region, and to learn from innovative research being conducted in Ukraine.
Finally, we moved to Truskavets – another mountain town, located not far from Lviv – where we met with some of the research participants who we had interviewed to conduct the first Photovoice workshop. We are using the Photovoice method to complement the narrative interviews and give our participants an opportunity to share their perspective on violence, survival and social reproduction through. The workshop was an opportunity to explore the main themes and concepts of our project with the participants, and to engage in practical and creative exercises for all of us – participants and researchers – to become more familiar and comfortable engaging with photography. It was also a chance to get to know the research participants and learn about their experiences first-hand.
Why was it important for you to go on this trip? What was its significance to the project?
Our project can be successful only if it works radically from the bottom up. We are deeply committed to participatory action research, which entails the co-construction of knowledge among academics and practitioners, researchers and researched. Accordingly, the project includes scholars and activists, and we draw on methods that privilege the understandings of the people we interview. For this to work, we need to engage with each other at many different levels, not only in Geneva (which we have also done). Going to Poland for our team meeting made it possible to include more of our partners from Lviv and Kharkiv, who were able to provide rich insights from the interviews they conducted and helped us develop first analytical themes. Moreover, doing our PhotoVoice workshop in Ukraine made it possible to bring together interviewees from around the country. For me personally, getting to know these people and their experiences left a deep and lasting impression. It made me begin to appreciate what it means to live under war, which will no doubt influence our joint analysis and writing.
What was the highlight of the trip – the best moment? And what was the hardest part of it?
One of the most powerful things was to experience the gratitude of people for being able to spend some time in the relatively safer environment of Western Ukraine, for being able to take their children and have them enjoy themselves (yes, we provided child care and games!), for being able to sleep three nights in a row without air raid alerts waking them up and forcing them into a shelter. And this was perhaps also the hardest part – the tears that were so close to the surface when people expressed their gratitude, and recognizing the enormous toll that the war was taking psychologically.
And can you remember something in particular that surprised you during your stay in Ukraine?
Perhaps how present the war was in everyday life – even in the Western and presumably safer parts of the country. We did experience one air raid alarm at night, and I learned about the importance of distinguishing what kind of attack to expect – whether from drones, ballistic or cruise missiles, or from Migs – and how these required different reactions. It was also gut-wrenching to see the images of fallen soldiers (including women) in the many memorials set up throughout Uzhhorod, and to experience the daily 9 am minute of silence commemorating them, followed by the national anthem broadcast through loudspeakers across the city. It was difficult to ever forget that the country was at war. Even in the spa town of Truskavets, we stumbled on camouflage nets stacked in a corner at the museum – woven by locals and ready to be sent to the front.
What are the next steps for the project? Any future travel plans?
We are now eagerly awaiting the translation of our interviews, and I am ready to sink my teeth into these materials in order to help develop the interpretive strands we identified at our team meeting. We are also beginning our interviews with policy-makers, which will tell us more about the way social reproduction and care labor can be better integrated into the reconstruction efforts. Another workshop is planned in Ukraine with participants in the PhotoVoice exercise soon, and we will need another team meeting in the spring. No location has been decided yet, but I am already looking forward to go back to Ukraine!
Related content
News from the project: Researching gender in (post-)conflict recovery: feminist methodologies, anti-extractivism and participatory approaches in the context of war
Research project Caring to Survive, Surviving to Care: Gendered survival practices, social reproduction and circuits of violence in Ukraine