Socially Engaged Projects

Diasporic Counter-Archives (US and Canada)

This project explores the evolving role of archives beyond traditional historical frameworks. While archives have long been the preserve of historians, defined by strict methodologies of collection, preservation, and dissemination, recent interdisciplinary shifts have opened new possibilities for how we engage with the past. Artists, activists, scholars, and technologists are increasingly reclaiming the archive to challenge institutional control over memory and history.

Focusing on grassroots efforts—such as community preservation and transnational documentation—this project investigates how archival practices shape and contest dominant narratives in the context of Central and East European diasporic communities living in the US and Canada. Through a combination of ethnographic research, historical analysis, and creative mapping, it highlights how personal memory, material culture, and collective identity intersect in spaces often overlooked by official histories.

This project hopes to bridge ways in which historians and sociologists think about intersectionality by looking at the experiences and perspectives of largely marginalized East European diasporic communities within the North American setting. It contributes to the perception of diasporic identities as dynamic and evolving through intersections of social status, class, gender, and ethnicity. It further draws attention to the role of art and recordkeeping as ways of challenging historical erasures as well as tools of community building.

Walking Memory Paths of Chernivtsi/Cernauti/Czernowitz (Ukraine)

This project explores how personal memory, identity, and emotion are inscribed in the urban landscape through the act of walking. Rooted in the methodology of psychogeography, it investigates how people navigate and emotionally engage with city spaces shaped by their past, social position, and lived experiences.

Focusing on the city of Chernivtsi (formerly Czernowitz), the project documents a series of walks recorded in August 2011 with Jewish descendants who were forced to leave during the Second World War. These intimate return journeys reveal how memory reshapes urban space—highlighting forgotten details, lost homes, and emotionally charged sites that no longer exist in the official cityscape. 

By combining ethnography, walking as method, and sensory mapping, Walking Memory uncovers the nostalgic traces that linger in urban environments. It offers a powerful lens into how cities are remembered, felt, and reimagined—well beyond what their material structures alone can convey.

Mapping Memory: Jewish Material Culture in Chernivtsi (Ukraine)

This project investigates Jewish cemeteries as vital sites of memory, identity, and contested heritage in postwar Eastern Europe. Far more than burial grounds, these spaces embody the cultural values, artistic traditions, and historical narratives of once-vibrant communities—while also revealing the tensions of memory politics in the present.

Between 2010 and 2015, I documented the Jewish diaspora’s efforts to preserve one of the largest Jewish cemeteries in Ukraine, located in the city of Chernivtsi (formerly Czernowitz). Once a rich testament to the city's pre-Holocaust Jewish life, the cemetery suffered decades of neglect during the Soviet era, becoming overgrown and forgotten. Since the 1990s, however, Jewish diasporic and local initiatives have slowly reignited interest in its restoration.

Through historical research and ethnographic collaboration with Jewish descendants returning to the city, I produced a multilingual series of cultural maps that highlight the cemetery’s symbolic, aesthetic, and architectural richness. These maps—published in English, German, Ukrainian, and Polish—have been disseminated through local cultural institutions and tourist networks, serving both educational and commemorative purposes. Mapping Memory offers a model for how historical research and community engagement can reclaim neglected spaces, turning sites of loss into platforms for dialogue, cultural continuity, and transnational remembrance.