PEOPLE, THINGS, AND EMOTIONS ON THE MOVE: ACADEMICS FROM UKRAINE AND MATERIALITY OF DISPLACEMENT

Abstract (English)

Russia’s war against Ukraine caused displacement, which historians and politicians compared with World War II. As mentioned in the Free to Think 2024 – Report of the Scholars at Risk Academic Freedom Monitoring Project, 1 in 5 Ukrainian universities is damaged or destroyed, 71 universities and 153 vocational education institutions have been incapacitated according to the Forbes Ukraine. Therefore, for many scholars, the war disables their ability to concentrate on research and continue their work in Ukraine, so they fled the country. The applied methodology includes such disciplines as the sociology of things, forced migration studies, and depiction of intellectuals in exile. People, things, and emotions should be analysed in their interaction during displacement, rather than isolated objects. This chapter focuses on the materiality of intellectuals, whose possessions and necessities are often their tools for knowledge production. My research material is based on 20+ in-depth interviews with displaced scholars from Ukraine and visual storytelling elements. In this presentation, I concentrate on the first stages of the move, namely departure from the home country and arrival in the host country, the motivations, and circumstances of this process. After transcribing the interviews, I contacted research participants, asking them to provide photos to illustrate their answers regarding questions: What did you take with you? Did you take some work-related objects? Therefore, I used the technique of object-based conversation. For my research, photographs have a double meaning. First, as objects that displaced academics took with them, secondly as visual representations and narratives, and as means of co-creation of meaning among the interviewee and research participants. Migrant objects play the role of “bridges between the home now and the home in the past” (Mastoureh, and Ní Laoire 2024: 72) and could be categorized as objects of memory, objects of instrumentality, objects of identity (Ibid). Furthermore, they carry “emotions, stories, and meanings that will later be translated differently in the new context where they arrive after their journey” (Claramonte 2024: 40-41). In my presentation, I am not aiming to classify the objects but rather consider them as keys for opening migrant stories (Höpfner 2022). Furthermore, as research material demonstrates, borders between people, things, and emotions in the process of forced migration are often blurred.