How it all began

This open educational resource (OER) is a product of intensive collaborative work by scholars and students within the program CEU Invisible University for Ukraine (IUFU). The IUFU was initiated in March 2022, immediately after the Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine, by a group of scholars and students affiliated with the Central European University, both in Vienna and Budapest. As a certificate program for Ukrainian undergraduate and graduate students, both residing in Ukraine and in refuge, IUFU differed from the simple model of a single university opening its own pre-existing courses to Ukrainian students.

From the beginning, IUFU was built on a network of inspired scholars, of Ukrainian and non-Ukrainian backgrounds, who wanted to contribute intellectual and other resources to the project. It was built on a coalition of university institutions, both in Ukraine and abroad, including Imre Kertesz Kolleg in Jena, Ukrainian Catholic University in Lviv, Ivan Franko University of Lviv, Center for Urban History of East Central Europe, Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, University of Agder (Kristiansand, Norway) and others. Financially, it has been supported by the Open Society University Network, with co-funding from the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (DAAD) and several other foundations.

In the Fall semester of 2024/25 academic year, IUFU offered seven online courses for more than 500 Ukrainian students representing all major university centers in the country. The classes provided interdisciplinary perspectives on the role of Ukraine in changing European and global contexts, placing questions relevant for Ukrainian students into a transnational comparative perspective. By then IUFU developed into a program with unique modalities. As a student-supported initiative it is governed and implemented largely by the students with the support of international scholars. As a rule, each course is coordinated by a team of scholars and students, and each session is co-taught every week by different guest speakers. Students serve as co-moderators of the discussion.

The idea to create a new OER emerged from this intensive interaction to offer materials to students around the world. It was inspired by Frances Pinter and the whole team of the CEU Press. All authors of this OER contributed to teaching two courses in the 2024/25 academic year: “Migration, Belonging, Politics” (co-directed by Oksana Mikheieva and Viktoriya Sereda, with Lidia Kuzemska and Alina Mozolevska teaching as invited speakers), and “Migrations and Diversity in Modern East-Central Europe” (co-directed by Oleksii Chebotarov and Vladyslava Moskalets, with Martin-Oleksandr Kisly as an invited speaker). Many of those who cooperated on the courses and the OER are themselves displaced scholars and students.

Each course also offered mentoring sessions of smaller groups where students could discuss lectures or work on their research projects. Within both courses a new form of cooperation between students and invited guests was developed. The study materials for a few selected sessions were turned into OER units with short explanatory texts. Volunteering student assistants were teamed with scholars and helped to look for interesting sources or illustrations, and to transform lecture-notes and sources into different forms of activities and tests. This collaborative work turned out to be inspiring intellectual fun for all involved, and we hope this OER will be useful outside the IUFU invisible classroom.