This thesis, Waiting for the Wind to Change, is a documentary novel that examines how individuals navigate uncertainty. It is based on six oral history interviews with people the author met in Brighton Beach, one of the largest post-Soviet diasporas in the United States. The narrators originate from Russia, Ukraine, Kyrgyzstan, and Belarus. The project examines how ongoing war, displacement, evolving immigration regimes, legal vulnerability, and political shifts shape everyday life. Across these interviews, narrators characterize the present as a state of waiting: for the war to end, for families to reunite, or for political conditions to change. While the specific objects of waiting differ, waiting itself emerges as a shared temporal orientation, an in-between condition shaped by uncertainty in which life continues through work, care, planning, and endurance. Drawing on oral history’s practice of shared authority, the project attends to pauses, silences, contradictions, and unfinished narratives that may resist clarity and resolution. The thesis further reflects on how the author’s journalistic background and oral history practice inform one another, highlighting ethical hesitation in decisions about consent, translation, editing, and representation.

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Yuri Fujita is an oral historian and journalist. She joined Columbia University’s Oral History Master’s Program (OHMA) after thirteen years at NHK, Japan’s largest public broadcaster. As a political correspondent, she reported on major policy debates and government decision-making, including during the COVID-19 pandemic, and conducted interviews with policymakers and public officials. Working in broadcast journalism led her to reflect on how much lived experience remains outside formal documentation. She pursued oral history to expand her listening and storytelling approach.

Yuri’s thesis project at OHMA draws on oral history interviews conducted in Brighton Beach, one of the largest post-Soviet diasporic communities in the United States. She listened to individuals’ accounts of navigating uncertainty shaped by war, displacement, legal vulnerability, and political shifts. Her work focuses on close attention to language, power, and representation across cultural contexts, and by a commitment to listening practices that hold stories without forcing resolution.