Lidia Kuzemska is a sociologist working on forced migration, internal displacement, borders, and citizenship. She was a 2022-25 Prisma Ukraïna fellow of the Gerda Henkel Foundation at the Forum Transregionale Studien and academic coordinator of the research group War, Migration, Memory. She is currently a research affiliate at the Internal Displacement Research Programme (SAS, University of London) and a part-time lecturer in Sociology at the Ukrainian Catholic University (Lviv).
Nora Ratzmann has joined the German Center for Integration and Migration Research in 2020, first as a Research Fellow in the Department Conflict and Consensus; since July 2022, she is leading several research projects on integration and settlement experiences in Germany, Department Integration, recently of protection-seekers from Ukraine. Her work takes dynamics of external and internal migration control and interactions between newcomers and state institutions into focus. Between 2022-2025 she also convened and coordinated the international research network "Forced Migrants from Ukraine in Transnational Europe".
Yuliya Byelikova is an activist, expert on media and gender issues, trainer in Internews, USAID, GIZ and U-LEAD projects on anti-discrimination, media literacy and inclusion. She holds a PhD in social sciences, is a lecturer at the Chair of Social Communication at Kharkiv National Kuznets Economic University, alumna of the Open World Leadership Center program, member of the Sociological Association of Ukraine, and the Independent Media Union of Ukraine. Yulia Byelikova is currently a Research Associate within the Mercator Forum on Migration and Democracy (MIDEM) at the Dresden University of Technology.
Valeria Lazarenko, coming from an interdisciplinary background spanning social psychology, human geography, and peace studies, has worked on questions of belonging and hopes of return among forced migrants. In her doctoral dissertatio she examined the sense of belonging and place-based identities of internally displaced people from Donbas, and after that explored the permanent temporariness and sense of (non-) belonging experienced by Ukrainian refugee women in Germany. Her current project within the PROMISE Research Unit at the University of Hamburg examines how life is imagined, sustained, and rebuilt during and after urbicide in Ukraine, focusing on hope and everyday practices of care and resistance.
Viktoriya Sereda is a sociologist and the head coordinator of the Virtual Ukraine Institute for Advanced Study (VUIAS) at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin. From 2024 to 2025 she was the senior academic advisor to the research group Prisma Ukraïna: War, Migration, Memory. She initiated and directed the project from 2022 to 2023 at the Forum Transregionale Studien in Berlin. Currently she also holds a position of a professor at the Kyiv School of Economics. Since 2020, she has also been a senior research fellow at the Institute of Ethnology of the National Academy of Sciencies of Ukraine and a professor at the Department of Sociology at the Ukrainian Catholic University.
