Life before the war: Mediating nostalgia and trauma in Eastern Ukrainian city communities

The conflict in Eastern Ukraine, which started in 2014 and remains ongoing, caused thousands of deaths and forced more than a million people to leave their homes and become internally displaced. The collective trauma of those who left the conflict zone and of those who stayed there is mediated via multiple means, including social media. Using digital platform affordances (e.g., the ability to produce digital archives and establish online communities), individuals are capable of expressing and processing their trauma, which is intrinsically related to the feelings of nostalgia about life before the way. In many cases, these nostalgic feelings about pre-war life in Eastern Ukraine are intertwined with the feelings of post-Soviet nostalgia, which is particularly strong in the region. To better understand the complex interplay between different temporal layers of trauma and nostalgia and how their mediation is enabled by digital technology, the paper looks at Ukrainian communities on Facebook (e.g., This is Donetsk, Baby or Region 13 - Lugansk) related to two major cities controlled by pro-Russian separatists, that is Donetsk and Luhansk. Using a combination of close reading and quantitative content analysis, it scrutinizes textual and visual content dealing with trauma and nostalgia, and discusses how community members use Facebook affordances to express their yearning for the past as well as to interact with others' expressio