Send message to Author

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores how Ukraine and the Russian invasion of Ukraine seeps in and out through the bodies, minds and 'souls' of Ukrainian refugees in Denmark, and colours their experience and ways of navigating their current, unwished for, lifesituation as temporarily displaces people.

Paper long abstract:

Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, over 30.000 Ukrainians have sought refuge in Denmark. Based on ethnographic fieldwork carried out between April 2022 and May 2023 in the southern and central part of Jutland, Denmark; this paper explores how Ukrainian refugees in Denmark experience and understand home and homeliness, and what it means to build a temporary home in a foreign country while your Motherland is at war.

"My body is here, but my heart and soul is still there", a woman said one day when speaking of the above theme. How is it to live when the sense of self is dispersed across such a large distance?

This paper explores how the Motherland, Ukraine seeps in and out through the bodies, minds and 'souls' of the Ukrainian refugees I am in contact with here in Denmark. The presentations explores and unfolds whether (,and if yes, how,) Tim Ingolds theories of 'weatherworld' and 'correspondence' can deepen our understand of what it means to live and be at home in a situation such as theirs. If we perceive with and correspond with our surroundings, what does it mean to be human when you have to flee the place in which you are immersed in and created through? And what does it do to your experience of home when that home that lives inside you are being bombed? How does the new environment in which you live as a refugee become part of you concurrently?