““I still ask myself and cannot find an answer: isn’t it irresponsible to have a child in these conditions? In the early stages of pregnancy I was hospitalized with the risk of losing the baby, and it turned out that the maternity hospital did not have the medicine I needed. The doctor offered a substitute, telling my husband to find it on his own. But his hopeless smile suggested that all searches would be just a waste of fuel. There is no such medicine in Stepanakert.””
—quote from an Artsakhtsi mother in Sofia Hakobyan’s “The Born and the Unborn in the Blockade” (July 12, 2023)
“Before I returned to Stepanakert, many people convinced me to stay in Yerevan, because there is almost no gas, electricity, or internet in Artsakh. But that call, that longing that you can feel only from your birthplace, was more important than all kinds of comforts.”
—quote from Svetlana Mikayelyan, posted by Learn4Artsakh
In addition to a formal lit review for my project, I’m carrying out a second, more informal lit review focusing on social media and press reports coming directly out of Artsakh during the blockade, bombardment, and displacement. I have three reasons for this—1, not enough time has passed since the loss of Artsakh for researchers to fully undergo the process of peer review and publication; 2, little to no data collection was carried out during the blockade itself, partially because of disruptions to critical telecommunications infrastructure; and 3, I feel that it’s crucial to center the voices of Artsakh Armenians themselves in my work and to deconstruct notions of what constitutes a “credible” source according to the standards of elite academia.
There are moments when, reading their words full of uncertainty, fear, even grim resignation, that the reality of what happened in Artsakh unexpectedly hits me all over again. I guess that ever since September 2023, I haven’t had a moment to fully process the magnitude of loss, instead keeping myself busy with action—mobilizing my community, spreading awareness, trying to get people to care. It’s only now that I am finally allowing myself the space to truly sit with it.
As Laidlaw scholars, many of us are dealing with emotionally complex or difficult topics that are in some way personal to us. That’s one of the things I love most about this program—we are all, in one form or another, drawing upon our own experiences, communities, and subjective histories to inform our research. There’s a lot of pressure in academia to practice “objectivity” or “neutrality” in order for our work to be seen as valid, something that gender studies scholars, particularly Black feminist thinkers, have pushed back against in favor of what Patricia Hill Collins terms a “scholar/activist tradition.” I hope to honor this tradition with my work this summer—centering and uplifting voices from my community, and remembering to give myself grace whenever it all becomes too much.