Article by Dorota Dakowska: «Fleeing and writing. The Ukrainian academic world in exile» (French Ethnology)
Dorotha Dakowska, Fleeing and writing. The Ukrainian academic world in exile«, French ethnology, 2025/3 Vol. 55, 2025, pp.55-71. CAIRN.INFO, https://shs.cairn.info/revue-ethnologie-francaise-2025-3-page-55?lang=fr.
Article summary:
Like more than six million Ukrainians, academics, particularly women, went into exile after the Russian invasion of their country on 24 February 2022. This article is based on observations made in France, Poland and Lithuania, and qualitative semi-structured interviews conducted in these three countries. Breaking with the idea that Ukrainian exiles integrate more easily thanks to favourable institutional conditions and professional situations, the article shows that, although they benefited from a surge of solidarity in 2022, these people often find themselves in a situation that is still precarious more than three years after their departure.
Presentation of the issue :
Russia's large-scale invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022 is triggering an exodus on a scale unprecedented in Europe since the end of the Second World War. More than 8 million Ukrainians fled their bombed or occupied country, while hundreds of thousands of Belarussians and Russians opposed to the war found refuge abroad to escape repression or mobilisation.
Based on surveys carried out in Georgia, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland and France between 2022 and 2024, the dossier analyses these exiles on a variety of scales, from the multiplicity of personal accounts told in the first person, the diversity of actors involved in receiving and supporting exiles, the migration policies implemented in the European Union, to the resurgence of memories of the mass violence that marked the continent in the 20th century.
Readers will perceive bursts of voices, silhouettes and faces, trembling traces of individual and collective destinies, caught up in the unbridled violence of the war unfolding on the European continent.
Contents :
Introduction. The war in Ukraine, exile and the social sciences
By Ronan Hervouet and Tatyana Shukan
The «map of links» of Ukrainian women. Geographical trajectories and relational resources in exile
By Catherine Lejeune, Camille Schmoll, Ivan Savchuk and Olena Savchuk
By Grégoire Le Gall
Fleeing and writing. The Ukrainian academic world in exile
By Dorota Dakowska
(Re)living exile: trajectories and experiences of Belarusian double exiles in Poland and Lithuania
By Tatyana Shukan
By Glutz O., Derkach O., Nagel J., Sergeeva M. and K. A.
Getting by in the meantime: Ukrainian exiles in search of sources of subsistence
By Denys Gorbach
Do exiled women join the diaspora?
Daily life in exile, politicisation and associative participation among displaced persons from Ukraine in France
By Hervé Amiot
“What's your superpower? - I am Ukrainian”
Trajectories of the politicisation of Ukrainian exiles in Greater Lyon
By Joséphine Brive
Welcoming people to the frontiers of the empire
Hospitality in the present and concerns about the past in Estonia and Latvia
By Anne Le Huérou and Françoise Daucé
The war in Ukraine as an event reconfiguring Belarusian diasporic organizations
By Agnieszka Fihel and Magdalena Lesińska
The places created by exile: Russian migrants in Tbilisi, 2022-2024
By Olga Bronnikova and Anna Zaytseva
Varia
Auschwitz and sensitive forms of enquiry in times of pandemic. A double absence
By Ewa Tartakowsky
Varia reports
By Jeanne Demoulin
By Anne Friederike Delouis
Anne-Christine Trémon. Contemporary anthropology. Paris, Armand Colin, 2024, 400 p.
By Christian Bromberger
