Author: Allison Jiang (Page 1 of 2)

Nadia Shpachenko and her colleagues were ready to share an aggressive political message in response to the Russian attack on Ukraine. “The war started on my birthday, so I was crying all night. The next morning, composer Lewis Spratlan passed away, we were very close collaborators,” said Shpachenko, to her audience during a concert at the Ukrainian Institute of America in New York.

 

“Lewis’s brother called me the morning after the war started and he said, ‘I want to write a piece about this war, and I want to kill Putin with it.”

 

Russian President Vladmir Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine is nearing the end of its third year. Back in Ukraine, blaring air raid sirens reverberate across the streets, but today, only a bustling New York City accompanies the melodies of 20th-century Ukrainian composer Thomas de Hartmann. Violinist Solomiya Ivakhiv and pianist Nadia Shpachenko are performing far from their homeland of Ukraine, where Shpachenko used to live and where all Ivakhiv’s relatives are today. For them, performances of largely forgotten Ukrainian compositions represent a broader phenomenon since the war: an artistic tradition rising from the ashes, molded into political messaging.

 

As the war continues, Ukrainian musicians must grapple with how to maintain the memory of an ongoing, brutal war. Three years out from Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, over 6.7 million Ukrainians have been forced to migrate away from their homes, wondering how to preserve the identity of Ukraine. Today, the response for Ukrainians has been an influx of music connected to the Ukrainian identity and an increasingly politicized purpose behind their branding as artists.

 

Before they performed, Ivakhiv told the audience that Shpachenko had been learning Ukrainian for the past few years and now refuses to speak Russian. “She is not as good as me yet, but she’s getting there,” joked Ivakhiv.

 

Shpachenko’s choice is emblematic of a broader trend of Ukrainians agreeing upon a resistance that is centered in culture, rooted in ancient artistic and linguistic traditions. The embrace of traditional art forms has served as a source of morale, as well as a political statement to the threat of erasure of the Ukrainian identity, a movement that has become increasingly visible on a global scale.

 

Historically, Slavic traditions associated with Russian culture come from Ukraine, where the origins of Slavic civilization took root. Through the 18th century, Russia was a relative cultural desert in comparison to Ukraine’s thriving literary and musical traditions according to Simon Morrison, a professor of music at Princeton University who studies the former Soviet Union and Russia.

 

For hundreds of years, Russia othered and reduced Ukraine through cultural condescension. Russian narratives have perpetuated stereotypes portraying Ukrainians as linguistically and socially rustic, as “rednecks.” “If you watch a comedy show in Russia, you see Ukrainian spoofs in terms of how they speak and their accents,” said Morrison.

 

Russia’s most acclaimed artistic figures have strong ties to Ukraine, but this aspect of their backgrounds have been mostly erased. Composer Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky spent over half his career in Ukraine and his second symphony incorporated Ukrainian folk songs. Novelist Nikolai Gogol was ethnically Ukrainian, yet never published works in Ukrainian because the Russian empire prohibited it.

 

“Terrible things happened via these systems of repression, creating a repertoire of work. Now, you find these ancient songs and they resonate with Ukrainians,” said Morrison. “You’re seeing this incredible effort from the Russians to obliterate anything to do with national cultural identity— archival collections, institutions—to leave Ukraine as a wasteland.”

 

Music is at the core of a resistance within an artistic-cultural battleground. As a defiant response to the Russian repression of Ukrainian heritage, Ukrainian musicians have reclaimed folk music. Though, as the war continues, artists have been experimenting with old music to create a distinct, modern Ukrainian sound.

 

“There’s been an explosion of musical practices. One main reaction to the full-scale invasion was to make more music and to repurpose old music,” said ethnomusicologist Maria Sonevytsky.

 

The hit song from Ukrainian group Kalush Orchestra’s win in the Eurovision Song Contest 2022, “Stefania,” is a representation of folk music changing amidst the war. This modernized return to Ukrainian music is a hip hop track, merging rap with traditional Ukrainian flute lines and a folk vocal hook. The song’s music video depicts a soldier in war trying to save her daughter and garnered over 73.3 million views on YouTube.

“The melody itself is from a very traditional province in southeastern Ukraine, but it’s taken a life of its own,” said Stephen Benham, president of Music in World Culture (MIWC) who frequently visits Ukraine for music development projects. “When I went to Ukraine, singing and leading the camp with the kids, they were trying to play ‘Stefania’ on their violins. It was a way of protesting, but also expressing Ukrainian identity.”

 

This reinterpretation of folk music has also functioned as a mode of global solidarity. The lead singer of Ukrainian rock-pop band BoomBox sang a 20th-century song associated with military resistance in front of the St. Sophia Cathedral in Kyiv shortly after the invasion. The clip became viral on social media and was initially remixed and shared by South African artist The Kiffness in “ARMY REMIX.” The clip proceeded to garner attention from a growing number of remixers by various artists across the world.

 

As a result of the war, Ukrainian musicians have acquired an unprecedented global platform that was driven by a geopolitical conflict. Due to the rise of new Ukrainian music being deeply connected to a political foundation, the content of Ukrainian musicians’ most popular work has been about the war and Ukrainian identity.

 

“We’ve been seeing musicians figuring out ways to use musical tools for advocacy. Ukrainian musicians who had huge platforms at the very beginning have smaller platforms now, as the world has gotten tired of the war in Ukraine. They’re finding new methods to call attention to their various causes,” said Sonevytsky.

 

Ukrainian artists have taken to the trend of political pop, looking to new hot-button social causes for their work. Jerry Heil who represented Ukraine in the Eurovision Song Contest 2024 released the song “#AllEyesOnKids” in August, raising awareness about Ukrainian children being illegally deported by Russia.

 

Still, Ukrainians say that there is still a great demand in Europe for this Ukrainian music. Many Ukrainian musicians have left Ukraine to nearby European cities, including pop musicians who are find profitable tour audiences across Europe.

 

“Ukrainians abroad will go to concerts because it’s Ukrainian music, their language, and it connects with them,” Vitaliy Bolgar, a Ukrainian guitarist and singer-songwriter whose family sought refuge in Germany. “Other people come because Ukrainian music is so beautiful. They actually begin to sing Ukrainian songs in the Ukrainian language. It’s influencing the overall fabric of Europe and connects Ukraine more towards Europe at a heart level.”

 

For some artists, Ukrainian pride has been an integral part of their platforms long before the war. Violinist Ivakhiv released her first album consisting of works from eight Ukrainian composers in 2016, when there was a smaller platform.

 

“I believe that as musicians, we are citizens. When people say that art is beyond politics, I disagree, because art is created by people who have to be responsible for their acts, statements, and beliefs,” said Ivakhiv. “It’s about taking a stand, and I believe that Ukrainians have the right to their own sovereignty.”

 

Perhaps there is no better example of an artist using their work to confront political turmoil than Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Zelenskyy was a comedian and TV show star of the 2015 political satire series “Servant of the People” where he played a history teacher unexpectedly elected the president of Ukraine, before launching a real bid for the presidency in 2018.

 

Zelenskyy’s role in the television program was uncannily art imitating life. zthe portrayal of Ukraine overrun by evil oligarchal corruption reflected a national worry of Soviet corruption. The Party of Decisive Changes was renamed the Servant of the People in honor of his bid during the 2019 Ukrainian parliamentary election.

 

Zelenskyy also grappled with the preservation of Ukrainian culture linguistically, growing up in a Russian-speaking region. He learned Ukrainian for the presidential position in 2018, and now gives national addresses in the native tongue.

 

[how to transition out?]

 

“Ukrainians when they’re heard, are typically heard at moments of political volatility,” said Sonevytsky. “Some Ukrainian musicians feel strongly that they want to keep making music like before, that doesn’t necessarily have a political message.”

 

A return to old music has served a political cause for many artists, but at its core still functions as a personal, therapeutic device.

 

“These songs were about the experience of being alive and the suffering one has, there was no sense of nation when they were created,” said Morrison. “It’s a part of the texture of life. Ukrainian art is fundamentally about the smaller epiphanies, the profundities of individuals.”

 

The return to folk music and other traditional art forms marks a broader renaissance of the Ukrainian identity and its community—reviving personhood and lost historical traditions.

 

“The idea, and even word for identity is relatively new in Ukrainian studies. They would use words closer to the definition of ‘personality,’” explained Benham, who was writing a dissertation in Ukrainian studies in 1997.

 

In the return to Ukrainian folk music, the power of Ukrainian identity is amplified through the guttural singing style and using the Ukrainian language.  “You’re trying to communicate how you’re feeling about your country, to other the people that don’t know you. We’re experiencing a wave, telling people this is who we are. Folk music is a very important way of letting people know what you’re going through,” said Bolgar.

 

Traditional music forms have functioned as a healing source for traumatic events across migrant communities. Culturally centered music is gaining recognition as a therapy protocol for migrant trauma patients, according to the National Institute of Health.

 

“Music has always played a really important role for Ukrainians, as for many people around the world. It’s always been a source of comfort and a symbol of resilience for people,” said Sonevytsky.

 

Music & healing

 

Political music and needing the attention with a dwindling platform

 

Dance scene quote, carpe diem attitude and a bursting art scene in response

 

Politicization internationally of arts in solidarity with ukraine, cosmopolitan artists rebranding, spotfy removing artists

 

At its core it is still used in a meditative and personal way

Healing, trauma

A migrant tradition

 

 

It is personal AND political

 

– – –

“There was a propaganda by our neighbor that Ukrainian culture does not exist. I am on a mission to share our deep, sophisticated Ukrainian culture,” said Ivakhiv. “It makes me happy to see that there is such interest in discovering Ukrainian culture through literature, music, art. But also, it makes me sad that it takes a tragedy for people to be more aware.”

 

Violinist Solomiya Ivakhiv and pianist Nadia Shpachenko’s duet reverberates through the silence of the room. The space is humble in contrast to its grandiose exterior: a three-story mansion across the street from the Met, home to the Ukrainian Institute of America. They are performing far from Ukraine, where Shpachenko used to live and where all Ivakhiv’s relatives are today. The concert named “Rediscovering Hartmann” closes on dances from the 20th-century Ukrainian composer’s Epera opera. Yet, underneath these folksy melodies, if you listen closely there is the interlude of New York City bustling underneath.

 

Rediscovery has rested at the core of Ukrainian identity since the start of the war in Feb. 2022. This is a rediscovery rooted in the revival of the past—of personhood, of lost historical traditions, and of an appropriated national culture. For these musicians, performances of largely forgotten Ukrainian compositions represent a broader phenomenon since the war: an artistic and linguistic tradition rising from the ashes.

 

However, as the global platform for Ukrainian musicians dwindles, they must grapple with how to maintain the memory of an ongoing, brutal war. Three years out from Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, over 6.7 million Ukrainians have been forced to migrate away from their homes and grapple with how they should preserve the identity of Ukraine. The response for Ukrainians has been an increasingly politicized purpose behind their musicmaking and branding as artists.

 

Shpachenko and her colleagues were ready to share a political and aggressive message in response to the Russian attack on Ukraine. “The war started on my birthday, so I was crying all night. The next morning, composer [Lewis Spratlan] passed away, we were very close collaborators. I was invited to perform at his memorial. Lewis’s brother always wanted me to play, he wrote most of his piano music for me,” Shpachenko said to the audience.

 

“He called me the next morning after the war started, and he said, ‘I want to write a piece about this war, and I want to kill Putin with it.’”

 

Before they performed, Ivakhiv told the audience that Shpachenko had been learning Ukrainian for the past few years and now refuses to speak Russian. “She is not as good as me yet, but she’s getting there,” joked Ivakhiv. Shpachenko’s choice is emblematic of a broader trend of Ukrainians agreeing upon a resistance that is centered in culture, rooted in ancient artistic and linguistic traditions. The embrace of traditional art forms has served as a form of therapy as well as a political statement to the threat of erasure of the Ukrainian identity, a movement that has become increasingly visible on a global scale.

 

Perhaps there is no better example of an artist using their work to confront political turmoil than Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Zelenskyy was a comedian and TV show star of the 2015 television series “Servant of the People” where he played the president of Ukraine before launching a real bid for the presidency in 2018. References to the series appeared in his political campaign’s logo and his inauguration. Zelenskyy too, grew up in the native Russian-speaking city of Kryvyi Rih, and delivers national addresses in Ukrainian.

 

“I believe that as musicians, we are citizens. When people say that art is beyond politics, I disagree, because art is created by people who have to be responsible for their acts, statements, and beliefs,” said Ivakhiv, sitting down for an interview. “It’s about taking a stand and I believe that Ukrainians have the right to their own sovereignty.”

 

In the aftermath of the full-scale invasion, there was an explosion of musical practices: Ukrainians have been making more music, but also creating new sounds by repurposing traditional folk music according to ethnomusicologist Maria Sonevytsky.

 

The hit song from Ukrainian group Kalush Orchestra that won Eurovision Song Contest 2022 “Stefania” represents this modernized return to Ukrainian music. The hip hop track features rap verses against lines played on traditional Ukrainian flutes, the sopilka and the telenka, and a Ukrainian folk song vocal hook. In the song’s music video, there is heavy imagery of soldiers and the war.

 

“The melody itself is from a very traditional province in southeastern Ukraine, but it’s taken a life of its own,” said Stephen Benham, president of Music in World Culture (MIWC) who frequently visits Ukraine for music development projects. “When I went there, singing and leading the camp with the kids, they were trying to play ‘Stefania’ on their violins. It was a way of protesting, but also expressing Ukrainian identity,” said Benham.

 

“We’ve been seeing musicians figuring out ways to use musical tools for advocacy. Ukrainian musicians, who had huge platforms at the very beginning, have smaller platforms now, as the world has gotten tired of the war in Ukraine, and so they’re finding new methods to call attention to their various causes,” said Sonevytsky.

– – –

“There was a propaganda by our neighbor that Ukrainian culture does not exist. I am on a mission to share our deep, sophisticated Ukrainian culture,” said Ivakhiv. “It makes me happy to see that there is such interest in discovering Ukrainian culture through literature, music, art. But also, it makes me sad that it takes a tragedy for people to be more aware,” said Solomiya, sitting down for an interview.

All these award-winning long-form pieces share a structure in the most abstract form, that they are examining characters on a deeply personal and even introspective level. Meanwhile, the narrative of the character in focus becomes a telescope that allows the reader to comprehend the implications of a specific story to a broader set of phenomena, connections, and realizations.

 

This is what I’ve observed in nearly all of the long-form, character-focused pieces that have been assigned to us this semester, but I think in the context of the stories that we are writing it is interesting to see how diverse the characters are, and how different journalists choose to handle the writing of that.

 

Specifically, I found myself intrigued by the focus on the character of the billionaire, and a non-traditional one at that. From the perspectives of us students taking the class, the characters that we’ve been working with carry story of a migrant and someone who quite easily elicits empathy: their arduous journey, a sense of purpose that fuels their migration. Eli Saslow’s piece delves into how the billionaire as a character is unsympathetic, constantly the target of democratic politicians’ rhetoric but yet also someone whose everyday habits center around making and ultimately giving money to charitable causes. The multidimensional and at times contradictory nature of this person provided a look into how a billionaire from humble beginnings really thinks. To me, this was a person who was utterly devout to the capitalist system and perhaps blindsided to some extent by that too.

 

Katie Engelhart’s piece focusing on a mother with dementia and how her closest circle must react was an interesting philosophical look into how one grapples with the ethics of patient treatment and medical agency. This piece felt more analytical and academic to me, pulling in a variety of voices and sources from different frameworks of thought to assess the specific situation of Diane. I also found the legal lens to be an interesting one, which was a shocking bubbling undercurrent of the piece where the dysfunction of guardianship/conservatorships were exposed in a raw light.

 

By looking through all of these pieces, there’s also a refreshing diversity in the styles and approaches to storytelling. I think certain techniques were very effective, specifically in how literary some interpretations verged on. I enjoyed the style of writing in Jennifer Senior’s piece on Bobby Mcilvaine, especially in the long-form lede that seemed to unpackage the mystery of what the story was behind Bobby and that form truly lent to the content of the story, similarly to the perspectives of the people around him trying to grapple with the belongings and scraps that remained after his death. This was intriguing from a reader’s experience, and is helping me think more broadly and creatively about what forms I may choose to use in my final piece.

The solemn violin drone of Solomiya Ivakhiv and the twinkling piano keys of Nadia Shpachenko reverberated through the warm silence of the room. The space was humble in contrast to its grandiose exterior: a towering three-story mansion across the street from the Met, home to the Ukrainian Institute of America. Before they play, Solomiya tells the audience that Nadia has been learning Ukrainian since the war began. “She is not as good as me yet, but she’s getting there,” joked Solomiya. They are now performing far from Ukraine, where Nadia used to live and where all of Solomiya’s relatives are today. The piece was a series of dances from the Epera opera by Thomas ‘Foma’ de Hartmann, honoring the 20th-century Ukrainian composer in a night of music named “Rediscovering Hartmann.” Yet, underneath the folksy, vivid melodies of these performers, if you listened closely, there was a muted interlude of sirens and horns from a bustling New York City bubbling underneath.

Rediscovery has rested at the core of Ukrainian identity since the start of the war in Feb. 2022. This is a rediscovery rooted in the revival of the past—of personhood, of lost historical traditions, and of an appropriated national culture. For these musicians, performances of largely forgotten Ukrainian compositions represent a broader phenomenon since the war: an artistic and linguistic tradition rising from the ashes. Three years out from Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, over 6.7 million Ukrainians have been forced to migrate away from their homes and grapple with how they should preserve the identity of Ukraine. Today, Ukrainian musicians are maintaining the memory of an ongoing, brutal war and a revitalized notion of being Ukrainian by carrying their country’s musical tradition close to their chest.

I thought that Julia Preston’s piece was an extremely elegant and accessible look into the divisive choice that voters were making in regard to immigration policy during the 2024 U.S. presidential election. I found that the historical context, existing policies, the moral dilemma of immigration, misinformation, and ideological conflict of the issue were effectively condensed into an extremely easy-to-follow piece.

 

At a fundamental structural level, this article makes me think about the writing structure articles we are assigned for class. The piece starts with a lede that situates the reader in the present, and the most urgent issue of the article which is the impending decision that the American population had to make. Preston spotlights the central question which is that the views of Harris and Trump on immigration seem to have converged to a certain extent. However, she makes clear that this is only a surface level analysis of their take on border policy, and begins to delve into the main body of the article.

 

Once the reader has been taken through her outlining of migration policy history and each candidate’s vision, she returns to the starting idea of this decision–-one that initially seemed to be rooted in a clash of beliefs, but more fundamentally is established in “a battle of competence” between the two. I found that these insights really sorted out the questions I had about how different these administrations’ approaches to immigration were, and this wrapped the article up in a very neat way.

 

I do not believe that this piece is labelled strongly as an opinion piece, yet at times, to me it comes off as one due to how anti-Trump policy the messaging is within the writing. The core of the piece rests in a factual foundation: of how border strategy has evolved across these two administrations and the offensive, misleading rhetoric that Trump has spurred is quoted.

 

This led to me to think about a broader question about journalistic integrity, which is how journalists manage the seeping through of personal opinion within writing. Obviously, based on when we spoke to Julia Preston in New York, she was a strong advocate of the Harris campaign. However, with immigration correspondence covering the election, talk about “nativism” and Trump’s rhetoric has bred distrust within right-wing supporters; fact-checking is seen as a violation of free speech and rests at the core of a lot of right-wing criticism about how the presidential and VP debates were conducted.

 

A statistic that I found quite surprising and pivotal was the Gallup poll this July that revealed 5 percent of adults said they favored lower immigration, the first time since 2005 that a majority held that negative view. This echoes a global shift that is breeding an anti-migrant sentiment, so how much can this shift be attributed to the Biden administration’s failures at the border? How about to Republican efforts to spread this opinion, like Greg Abbott’s bussing efforts?

Vitaliy Bolgar is a regular at the military evacuation hospital, the first stop for Ukrainian soldiers when retreating from the warzone. This sanctuary stands 20 miles out from Donestk Oblast in eastern Ukraine, where armed forces soldiers stand—a line of bodies—defending against Russian troops. “These guys come off the front lines and they’re watching their friends get destroyed. Their eyes are empty like glass, nothing behind them,” says Bolgar.

 

To the soldiers, Bolgar is a healer. He has become a popular visitor, with many men specifically requesting his treatment. “You could see a kind of life being breathed back into the soldiers,” says Bolgar describing the effects of his care. What Bolgar possesses is not a secret medical antidote: he arrives with a guitar, his voice, and traditional Ukrainian folk songs.

 

Three years out from the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine, Bolgar’s musicmaking has been a form of lifesaving therapy to process the trauma and grief of the war, not only for the soldiers and victims of military attacks, but also for himself. Bolgar’s musical choices reflect a broader trend of the Ukrainian folk tradition’s postwar revival. Ukrainian folk music has become a uniting cultural marker for Ukrainian identity. Refugees as well as those who stayed unanimously returned to an old and largely forgotten culture, embracing the same songs across national lines.

 

Since Russia’s attack of Kyiv in February 2022, Bolgar has remained in western Ukraine. Bolgar worked tirelessly with relatives to find a way to transport his wife, Ludmila and son, Julien out of Ukraine to safety, eventually linking up with a Christian Romanian group in May. “In the back of your mind, you think about the huge amounts of human trafficking that takes place of women from Ukraine and from Russia,” Bolgar said. While his family reached refugee settlement camps in Germany, Bolgar was unable to flee and spent over a year alone in Kyiv.

 

In his solitude, the persistent accompaniment to Bolgar’s life was blaring air raid sirens. His body settled into a state of physical unrest, unable to sleep and constantly on edge for an impending attack. “I used to love putting music on to get moving and to lift myself up. Now, the music that I want to listen to is quiet, it brings peace to your soul,” said Bolgar.

 

This newfound need for meditative music shaped what he chose to sing to the front-line soldiers at the military hospital. Bolgar was singing traditional Ukrainian folk tunes: patriotic yet spiritual songs that have been rising from the ashes of a shared cultural fabric.

 

“Since the beginning of the war, people have returned to patriotic music, to traditional Ukrainian folk songs that haven’t been sung for many, many years,” said Stephen Benham, president of Music in World Culture (MIWC) who frequently visits Ukraine for music development projects. “You’re seeing the return to the idea: what does it mean to be a Ukrainian?”

 

In the folk song tradition, Ukrainians and the diaspora are recognizing the duty to preserve a culture that is threatened by extinction says Simon Morrison, a professor of music at Princeton University who studies the Soviet Union and Russia.

 

“Now that there’s this monstrous force that’s seeking to erase them as a people, Ukrainians are finding within songs of lament,” Morrison said. “These songs are communal expressions of grief, a wealth of material that people associated with these traumatic events that have occurred over and over again.”

 

Today, this notion of the Ukrainian identity is also being revived linguistically. Bolgar was raised in the small Russian-speaking village of Bograd, but switched to speaking Ukrainian since the start of the war. His choice reflects trends amongst Ukrainians towards reclaiming the Ukrainian identity and its modern expression, but still being rooted in the traditions of old Ukraine according to Benham.

 

Now, the Ukrainian language and music are the two main cultural identifiers for Ukrainians who have left. “All of a sudden, they want to sing Ukrainian folk songs, even if they never spoke a word of Ukrainian in their life. That is a big deal for people to say, ‘We’re not Russia,’” Benham said.

 

However, there has been an increasingly bitter discourse around Ukrainians who fled since the start of the war. A negative sentiment has risen around Ukrainians leaving, labeling them as abandoning those who chose to remain, says ethnomusicologist Maria Sonevytsky.

 

“For musicians, it’s an ambiguous question: what do you do in the moment of a crisis like this one? Some of course joined the military. Many, especially pop musicians who use commodified platforms, understood that they would have better luck in Western Europe,” said Sonevytsky.

 

As Ukrainian musicians search for a new audience of listeners outside their country, the sudden burst of international attention towards Ukrainian artists since the start of the war has also brought a sense of global solidarity for these musicians.

 

“It feels very powerful that Ukrainian music is even in the U.S., that everybody knows about Ukraine now,” said Sonya Zhukova, a Ukrainian singer-songwriter who is a refugee in Poland, about a performance at her music camp in Los Angeles. “In that moment, I just closed my eyes and I thought about the war. I felt this support from my team: that they loved Ukraine, they support us, and everything is okay.”

 

Bolgar’s current musical project is creating a Ukrainian psalm book with guitar backing tracks, specifically for soldiers based on his performances at the military hospital. The book contains a mix of traditional Ukrainian folk songs as well as spiritual songs aiming to spread peace, calm, and hope during the war.

 

“Sometimes one of the guys will be a musician and have a guitar in the in the trench with them. Other times, they just don’t have anything,” Bolgar said.

 

He hopes to meet his fundraising goal of $3,500 to make recording backing tracks a reality, so that soldiers can have the music to listen and sing to while they are in battle.

 

“Ukraine is not just our territory, but it’s our culture as well. We want Ukrainians to remember who they are when they leave the country. We want there to be a Ukrainian culture that remains, and music is a really important part of it all,” said Bolgar.

 

“In the midst of this horrible war, music is not only our therapy, but it also lifts us up to go into battle together, so that we know we are fighting for our freedom.”

Question:

How are Ukrainian refugees and Ukrainians abroad finding meaning/processing grief using music today?

Differences between those who stayed and left?
Rebranding and sudden attention to Ukrainian artists?

 

There has been a revival of traditional folk Ukrainian music since the start of the war. This has been a source of healing and processing of grief in a strange turn of events; there is a return of a linguistic and musical tradition that has largely been forgotten before the war.

 

Or has it? I have conflicting sources. Some people believe that this war truly reignited a tradition that has brought unprecedented attention and linked Ukrainian refugees and those who have stayed. Another that I talked to believes that the folk tradition has been coming back into the light for decades now, and that this revival has been dramatized.

 

I am still trying to find my angle and would like to root it more to the idea of migration and the refugee experience. This is an approach I hope to take by talking to more Ukrainian refugee organizations.

 

JRN 449 Final Project Source List

 

* = musician/performer

 

People I have interviewed:

Vitaliy Bolgar* – Ukrainian director Music in World Cultures (MIWC), Singer & Guitarist
Stephen Benham – Professor of Music Education at Duquesne University, President of Music in World Cultures (MIWC)
Sonya Zhukova* – Singer-Songwriter, Musika Musika Communications (REACH OUT)
Simon Morrison – Professor of Music at Princeton University, Focus: the musical, cultural, and political histories of the Soviet Union, Russia, the United States
Solomiya Ivakhiv* – Violinist
Maria Sonevytsky – Associate Professor of Anthropology & Music at Bard College

 

To reach out to:

Jana Strukova, PhD’ 07 Princeton Theological Seminary (leads program at church that welcomes Ukranian refugees)
Interfaith Refugee Resettlement Committee
Princeton For Ukraine (I connected with the Facebook Page)
Ukrainian Institute of America
Nadia Shpachenko, piano (concert at Ukrainian Institute of America on Nov 17 that I was invited to, they said I could speak to her)

 

 

 

 

These articles have the acute skill of taking astute, specific observations about small quirks or details about a person and drawing it the broader narrative and social phenomena relevant to the story they’re trying to tell. This presents as a literary approach to writing, one where form fits content in the sense that these are deep immersions into personal being. However, upon this personal being the reporters are ultimately seeking to draw attention to the external forces that led this person to their current state of being.

 

In this case of Tales For Trash by Hessler, there’s an extension to the idea of Egypt’s epidemic of illiteracy. Quite literally, Hessler connects the individual man to a national phenomenon: “For the leaders of the revolution, who are mostly middle and upper class, the experience of a citizen like Sayyid is a perfect example of why radical change is necessary.”

 

In Dancing For their Lives, Um Nour’s ripe enthusiasm is stretched to this crisis of women in the freelance prostitution market, and an Iraqi political history of corruption: “I could see why this was Um Nour’s favorite club. The system of cost and rewards favored women who wanted some control over their work. It was a freelance market.”

 

I found this to be a very useful tool in writing and I enjoy pondering about this concept of using the personal to peel back into the larger political issues that may seem more distant to the average reader.

 

In that vain, in these pieces I noticed an interested theme that was the idea of inserting the author into the world of the individual being profiled. Notably, in Taub’s How a Syrian War Criminal and Double Agent Disappeared in Europe, I found it interesting how there is quite a revealing statement about how deeply this story has infiltrated his mind and his work. The Taub piece on Khaled al-Halabi presented the profile in a form that felt more traditionally “news story”-esque to me, in tone and content at the start, but that changes as you progress thorugh the story.

 

“Directly above the Austrian woman’s apartment, a man who looked like Khaled al-Halabi sat on his balcony, shielded from the late-morning sun. But I was unable to confirm that it was him.”

 

This closing paragraph almost feels romantic as he describes the sun falling upon the balcony, reminiscent and deeply reflective of the experience that has been stepping into Halabi’s shoes and committing to his story and life for years.

 

You can also quite easily hear a distinct tone and humor in the profiles that isn’t present in some of the more fact-based pieces that we’ve covered this semester, which lean into acknowledging the positionality of the reporter themselves. There is an ethnographic perspective that peers through these articles, really painting the scene and the characters so that the reader understands the scene as well as how the journalist fits into it.

 

I thought that the authors used speech as the foundation to their painting of a person, like using their unusual and fascinating syntax, mannerisms in speech as brushstrokes to really capturing how a person talks and exists.

 

 

In the Bellingcat Documentary, the current state of human perceptions of online content is described as an “emotional relationship to information.” From the average citizen to a world leader, how are we controlling and monitoring information in a way that tells the true story, instead of watching content echo back to us our existing beliefs? Something that permeated this week’s readings was the idea of how accountability and evolving interpretation techniques defined the practices of OSINT.

 

Something that struck me was how OSINT journalism was doing the job of traditional media outlets in a way that exceeded the current abilities of those outlets. For example, forensic techniques of an independent organization like Bellingcat interpret information and guide readers in a way that only those active in open-source investigations could do.

 

I enjoyed learning about the specific approaches used that have revolutionized the idea of accountability for global human rights in modern warfare. For example, the idea of creating networks of verified identities based on tattoos, birthmarks, freckle patterns, and scars was fascinating.  The Forbes piece also spotlit a “gamified” crowdsourcing approach to collecting smartphone footage of the war in Ukraine that is helping officials piece together attacks, by upping the quantity and quality of footage submitted.

 

In the current age of warfare, there is an unprecedented speed in which information spreads and therefore gathering it needs to match that speed. OSINT functions as the remedy to this: gaining a well-rounded image about what is happening so that there is a data-based foundation.

 

This data-based foundation rested at the core of the implications of how open-source reporting could be applied to the sphere of the International Criminal Court (ICC). I was largely unaware about how difficult war-crimes cases are to prosecute, and of the fractures that exist within the structures of the ICC. I enjoyed the optimistic view of seeing how journalists’ work in acquiring citizen evidence is reinventing modern warfare and accountability in international justice.

 

Thinking about the work of open-source journalists and the work’s application to international war accountability, learning about this world left me with questions about preserving the integrity and reliability of open-source investigations, specifically in how world leaders and press outlets can undermine sources used in OSINT and their work. As social media and video content becomes increasingly malleable and prone to convincing manipulation (e.g. deepfakes, AI-generated content, photo editing), how will open-source journalists work to maintain the integrity of their sources and gain trust? Are there new techniques that Bellingcat is developing in this changing technological landscape?

 

Building upon the idea of content manipulation, I wonder if upon the further growth and expansion of OSINT and its notoriety that content may be manipulated and weaponized to breed falsehoods in the investigations. For example, what if traceable aspects of an individual (scars/tattoos) are manipulated to mislead journalists?  In this kind of situation, how does the field adapt? Would the rise of OSINT and the spread of its methods potentially bring about a new era of misinformation warfare?

Candidate Donald Trump insists that the votes of noncitizen immigrants will skew the 2024 U.S. presidential election. He repeats his claim in his rallies and focused on this anti-immigrant rhetoric in the 2024 presidential debate.

 

“A lot of these illegal immigrants coming in, they’re trying to get them to vote.” said Trump in the September debate broadcasted by ABC. “They can’t even speak English. They don’t even know what country they’re in practically. And that’s why they’re allowing them to come into our country,” he said charging Kamala Harris, his democratic challenger, without evidence as being part of a voting scam.

 

These claims follow a pattern of Republican-led misinformation about voter identification and election interference. Trump’s denial of the 2020 election results was rooted in claims around the unreliability of mail-in ballots and dead people’s votes skewing election results. During this election cycle, misinformation around noncitizen voting is uniquely rampant due to voter polarization and distrust of traditional media, shifting toward alternative sources of news like social media says Laura Feldman.

 

“People are not as trusting of legacy and mainstream news outlets, whether it’s the New York Times, the Associated Press, or CNN,” says Feldman, professor of journalism and media studies at Rutgers University. “Republicans are much more likely to distrust news media than Democrats, which can be connected to elite rhetoric about liberal media bias.”

 

Misinformed anti-migrant and racist messaging has defined Republican rhetoric during past presidential election cycles. Trump, before he was a presidential candidate, spread birtherism conspiracies about candidate Barack Obama during the 2008 election, falsely claiming that Obama was born in Kenya and therefore ineligible to serve as US president. Fox News and GOP leaders amplified the “great replacement” theory—that immigrants are coming into the US to replace white Republican voters—to a mass audience following the Republican loss of the 2020 election.

 

“I know that the left and all the little gatekeepers on Twitter become literally hysterical if you use the term ‘replacement,’ if you suggest that the Democratic Party is trying to replace the current electorate [with] more obedient voters from the third world,” said Fox News host Tucker Carlson on Fox News Primetime in April 2021, supporting the great replacement conspiracy. “But they become hysterical because that’s what’s happening actually.”

 

Trust in traditional news media steadily declined since the 1990s amidst a media environment that became more sensational and tabloid-driven, intensifying upon Trump’s claims about mainstream outlets broadcasting fake news, according to Feldman. As a result, audiences turned to alternative media sources.

 

Algorithmic changes and the misinformation policies of social media companies have affected the dissemination of information and conspiracies on these platforms. Elon Musk, who acquired X (formerly Twitter) in 2022 has been an outspoken endorser of Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign, fueling doubts about noncitizen election interference in his posts.

 

“The goal all along has been to import as many illegal voters as possible,” said Musk in July on X, to his over 200 million followers. His post garnered 45.8 million views. Musk’s posts about noncitizen voting conspiracies have been viewed over 200 times more than fact-checking posts correcting those claims published on X, reported NBC news.

 

“He bent the algorithm around his own account so he can draw attention to specific topics in a way that literally no other user on social media can,” said Andy Guess, an associate professor at Princeton University, who studies polarization and misinformation in politics. “He’s totally fixated on this noncitizen issue and can elevate these baseless claims in a way that gets people talking about them.”

 

Musk’s amplification of noncitizen voting conspiracies follows a wave of a right-wing media boom on social media platforms characterized by xenophobia.

 

In the past year, YouTube and Rumble livestreamers made money filming and harassing migrants at the US southern border, and TikTok videos claiming that refugees have entered the US as an “invading army of sleeper cells” quickly gained virality. Anti-migrant content is one of the leading narratives on TikTok says Lucy Cooper.

 

“People could be led to anti-migrant content from consuming news about what was happening at the time, and in that way, immigration is one of the issues that’s the most opportunistic. There’s a lot of pathways into it,” says Cooper, a digital research analyst at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD) who researched TikTok and anti-migrant content.

 

As a growing population of Americans that rely on social media as a news source, social media platforms have transitioned to a hands-off approach to managing political misinformation says Guess.

 

“One side said, ‘You’re not doing enough to remove hate speech.’ The other said, ‘You’re censoring people.’ There was no way to satisfy both so the platforms generally try to pull back on politics altogether,” Guess says.

 

Unlike public health misinformation that was widespread during the pandemic in 2020, social media platforms lacked a uniform approach to political misinformation.

 

“When it comes to viral misinformation about migrants, there’s just no such playbook. An individual case or anecdote that might be based on something real can turn into sweeping statements. It is ambiguous at what point it becomes misinformation.” says Guess.

 

Young viewers are increasingly getting news from social media platforms as opposed to professional journalism outlets. In the past four years, the share of young adults who regularly get news from TikTok has grown nearly fivefold, up to 45% in 2024, revealed a Pew Research study.

 

Older demographics encounter different challenges around navigating a changing news media landscape. “They still don’t have crystallized perceptions of the orientation of the platform. That means they’re able to build trust in these platforms because they’re more novel,” said Guess.

 

Amidst a fragmented social media landscape, with users consuming content on various platforms, the ability to tailor content and reinforce echo chambers further entrenches the noncitizen voting conspiracy according to experts.

 

“Social media removes the gatekeepers, it’s completely unregulated. It’s increasing the scale in which information and misinformation can spread,” says Feldman. “Within those platforms, everybody is seeing different stuff, so it’s very easy for us to surround ourselves with the information that echoes back to us our existing world views.”