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Paper short abstract

This paper examines how young people from Ukraine remember journeys undertaken in the context of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Drawing on experimental ethnography, it explores how forced migration reshapes sensory experience through intensified perception and fragmented memory.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines how young people from Ukraine remember journeys undertaken in the context of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Based on ethnographic research with young Ukrainians living in Poland, it asks how war-induced migration reshapes sensory experience and how these experiences are later narrated, recalled, or partially forgotten.

In many experiences, the journey from Ukraine does not appear as a linear movement across mapped space. Instead, it is remembered through fragments: images seen through train or bus windows, the sound of crying children in overcrowded carriages, the bodily discomfort of sitting or sleeping in constrained positions, cold, waiting, exhaustion, and the difficulty of withdrawing from shared spaces of transit.

I focus on three interrelated modes of sensory experience. First, I discuss intensified perception in motion, where ordinary landscapes, buildings, trees, signs, and people become objects of heightened attention and visual memorisation. Second, I examine sensory and bodily overload produced by the material and social conditions of wartime mobility: overcrowded transport, long waits, limited rest, noise, and uncertainty. Finally, I explore the fragmentary character of sensory traces, including moments when memory fades, collapses into logistical sequences, or is expressed through aesthetic references such as dreamcore or backrooms.

Rather than treating these experiences as individual psychological responses, the paper approaches them as socially and materially shaped forms of sensing, remembering, and narrating forced mobility.