2025/11/25 by Iuliia Hoban · 1 voice
Social Sciences · #Children's Rights and Participation #Child Development and Digital Technology #Participatory Visual Research Methods
paper · doi:10.1525/cpcs.2025.2473436
openalex publication_date 2025/11/25 · openalex created_date 2025/11/27 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/23
The full-scale war in Ukraine has had a wide-ranging impact on the nation’s children as they have been displaced, wounded, and even killed. In the context of the Russia-Ukraine war, Ukrainian children found ways and created spaces that allowed them to express their agency, ranging from narrating their experiences in diaries, poems, and art to engaging in political activities related to war. This study explores the potential of arts-based programs to empower children affected by armed conflict, with a focus on the Behind Blue Eyes initiative, implemented following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. By distributing disposable cameras, this program encouraged children affected by war to document their lives through photography, subsequently sharing their visual narratives on the Behind Blue Eyes initiative’s social media account on Instagram. Through thematic and semiotic analyses of these digital stories, this research investigates how children express agency, engage with geopolitical discourses, and navigate their traumatic experiences through their photographs during the Russia-Ukraine war. The study also examines how adults mediate children’s narratives through digital storytelling, revealing the complex dynamics of children’s agency within armed conflict contexts. The research addresses these questions and contributes to the scholarly discourse on children’s experiences in conflicts beyond Ukraine, Eastern Europe, and Central Asia. This research also advances the understanding of how arts-based programs offer a medium for children to express and transform their experiences of war, which also challenges narratives of children as passive actors in contexts of large-scale political violence.