Undergraduate Research Spotlight
Using Narratives to Understand the Experiences of Recent Ukrainian Immigrants to Chicago
Research by Doris Warriner & Volodymyr Sobko
Our Department has a strong commitment to providing and fostering innovative research opportunities for undergraduates. Doris Warriner’s ongoing research with WCAS sophomore, Volodymyr Sobko, is an impressive example of this type of collaboration.
Volodymir was a student in Doris’s first-year seminar, “Narratives of Migration” in the fall of 2024. As the son of Ukrainian immigrants, Volodymyr was inspired by the course to gain a better understanding of the experiences of recent Ukrainian immigrants living in Chicago. He was specifically interested in the lives of the most recent wave of immigrants who have re-located to Chicago since 2014, when Russia invaded Crimea.
With Doris’s guidance and support, Volodymyr prepared and submitted an IRB proposal to study “Ukrainian Migration, Employment, and Opportunity in Greater Chicago”. The goal of the study is to generate and analyze narratives about first-hand experiences of migration and employment, drawing on semi-structured interviews from Ukrainians currently living in Chicago. The research protocol was approved in the spring of 2025, and Volodymyr collected the first wave of interviews last summer, between June and August. All the interviews were conducted in Ukrainian and were first transcribed into written Ukrainian before being translated into English.
Based on this initial research, Doris and Volodymyr submitted an abstract for the 2026 American Association of Applied Linguistics Conference, held here in Chicago at the Sheraton Riverwalk. Their abstract was accepted, and on March 23rd, they jointly presented their paper, “Right now we’re just Pending: Experiences of Displacement, Life-making and Precarity”, highlighting the themes of uncertainty consistently voiced by their five interlocutors. Their research documented how the narrative accounts reflected the deep vulnerabilities associated with work and life among their participants. Indeed, this uncertainty about their ability to remain in the US has shaped decisions about work and language education, leaving them “in a suspended state”, as one respondent noted.
Volodymyr Sobko and Doris Warriner at the 2026 American Association of Applied Linguistics Conference, March 23, 2026.
With the support of an academic year Undergraduate Research Grant (URG), Volodymyr is continuing this research, carrying out follow up interviews on four of the five original participants and recruiting new participants. This collaboration is providing rich insights into the lived experiences of an under-studied immigrant group. These accounts of their experiences of migration are mediated by their past journeys and the increasing precarity and anxieties of the current political moment.
When he is not carrying out research in Linguistic Anthropology, Volodymyr is taking coursework as an Economics major and a Business Institutions minor. As part of his economics training, Volodymyr has secured a prestigious internship this summer with Goldman-Sachs. With his training and experience in both Anthropology and Economics, Volodymyr will bring an appreciation of both qualitative and quantitative approaches to the world of finance!
We sincerely wish Volodymyr and Doris continued success with their research collaboration as they begin to prepare this work for publication. Additionally, we are most grateful to Doris for her deep commitment to engaged research and training with our students. This work showcases the power and importance of anthropological research for addressing important social issues and supporting local communities.