Mapping identities: Narratives of displacement in Ukraine

Abstract

The armed conflict in Ukraine, which lasts for more than five years, has caused significant changes to Ukrainian society. More than 1.7 million people have been forced to leave their homes, becoming internally displaced. In such conditions, questions of identities become quite important for those affected. In this paper, I present the results of the research investigating the identities of displaced people in Ukraine, drawing from combined narrative interviews and mental sketch mappings of the respondents' home cities in the Donbas region in Ukraine, and their current place of residence.Combining the perspectives of psychology and human geography, I address this question: how can we understand the complex identities of displaced people through the spatial aspect? To do so, I will specify how the identity of displaced people, revealed through the mapping exercise, rests on three core concepts: home, trauma and displacement, which I contend are inextricably linked. The research results show that such mental mapping exercises can facilitate the revelation of traumatic experience through the process of map creation, and at the same time, localize the trauma in the past, providing a tool to re-evaluate it.