Mapping Displacement

Abstract

The international armed conflict in Ukraine, which has been going on for already more than five years, has caused significant changes in Ukrainian society. More than 1.7 million people have been forced to leave their homes and become internally displaced. In such conditions, the question of identities becomes one of the most important for the affected people. The overall social situation of displacement has contributed to the individual and community self-perception of displaced people, and the creation of the ‘resettlement identity’ among them. Such specific social identity became the main subject of the author's research and will be discussed in the current paper. This article presents the first results of the ongoing research into social identities of displaced people in Ukraine. The research was conducted through a combination of narrative interviews and mental sketch mapping of the respondents' home cities in Donbas and their current places of residence. The research data was analysed from the perspectives of social psychology as well as of human geography, and the results show how the emotion-laden phenomenological experience contributes to spatial perception of the city and to turning space into place. The mapping and narrativization processes make it possible to distinguish the crucial elements of the complex identity of the displaced people: the Donbas identity, the Ukrainian identity, and a specific resettlement identity that simplifies the identification with a huge group of people sharing similar experiences. Our research shows that mental sketch mapping as a method helps to elicit the complexity of identities among the displaced people. Moreover, mapping exercise, combined with a narrative interview, also had a therapeutic effect upon the respondents as the research subjects experienced change during the interview. The complex usage of a position of existential outsideness (Relph 1980) revealed in the research, may be the symptom of a personal crisis. Thus the reflexive work on the maps may be a tool for displaced people to rethink and transform their spatial-temporal coordinates and their identities.