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Accepted Paper:
"I have no place to return to": Multiple Crises and Agency in the Stories of Educated Women Forced to Leave Ukraine after Russia's Full-scale Invasion in 2022
Kristina Šliavaitė
(Vilnius University)
The paper analyses the interviews with educated Ukrainian women who were forced to leave Ukraine for Lithuania after the Russia's full-scale invasion in 2022. I focus on the range and multidimensionality of crises narrated, as well as the narrators' agency in dealing with these crises.
Paper Abstract:
This paper focuses on the narratives of educated women from Ukraine who were forced to leave their homeland as a result of the full-scale Russia's invasion in 2022. The paper is based on on-going research in Lithuania and at the moment consists of more than ten in-depth interviews and participant observation. I argue that certain common structures and emotions are present in the narratives of the research participants. The stories told by the women who were forced to leave Ukraine contain narratives of crises that are experienced at different levels - at the individual, the family and the community level. However, in numerous cases the narrators refer to their experiences of empowerment and construct themselves as active agents in dealing with these crises. In other cases the narratives of disempowerment are constructed. My research and analysis is inspired by anthropological approaches to trauma narratives that see the very act of telling a story as an empowering and agency restoring action (see e.g. Michael Jackson (2013) "The Politics of Storytelling", Vieda Skultans (1998) "The Testimony of Lives: Narrative and Memory in Post-Soviet Latvia").