Perpetual Survivorship: Ukrainian Women’s Narratives of Displacement

Abstract This article addresses a theoretical gap in victimology by examining forms of victimisation in which harm has no clear endpoint and survivorship cannot be understood as a post-trauma condition. Drawing on participatory storytelling with displaced Ukrainian women resettled in the UK following Russia’s 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine, it develops the concept of perpetual survivorship to describe a temporally open state in which loss, uncertainty, care, agency and adaptation coexist. Using a community-based, trauma-informed methodology grounded in Performative Social Sciences, data were generated through a filmed collaborative storytelling workshop involving 12 Ukrainian refugee women in Cambridge. The narratives were analysed thematically, focusing on identity, motherhood, care, trauma, resilience and future uncertainty. The findings highlight both the substantive and methodological value of participatory storytelling. By allowing participants greater control over how and when they shared their experiences, the approach revealed nuanced forms of agency and vulnerability that might remain hidden within more researcher-led methods. Participatory storytelling is therefore conceptualised not as therapy, but as a relational space for collective recognition, public testimony and alternative knowledge production. Substantively, the study demonstrates that the “cost of crossing” is not confined to the act of migration itself. Rather, displacement constitutes an ongoing, relational condition that begins before physical movement, continues through everyday experiences of survival, and extends into uncertain futures. Agency and vulnerability emerge simultaneously rather than sequentially. The article therefore proposes perpetual survivorship as a framework for understanding survival as a continuous process enacted under conditions where the consequences of harm remain active and the future remains unresolved.