In this talk, I present results of an ethnographic research project with Ukrainian women in Stockholm, conducted over the past six months from September 2024 to February 2025. Foregrounding the individual experiences, the project builds on traditional and creative methodologies (Elliot & Culhane, 2016), such as open-ended interviews and walking tours, language portrait and figure crafting workshops, as well as participants’ multimodal documentation of their lived experiences of language (Busch, 2017, 2020) through images and reflections with QualNotes.

The presentation is intended to initiate a discussion on questions of forced migration due to war, trauma, and multilingualism (Busch & McNamara, 2020; Drozdzewski & Dominey-Howes, 2015). Since one of the project outcomes is an intended art exhibition and a creation of an online archive, the talk also seeks to open up a dialogue surrounding politics and practices of communicating research beyond academia while dualizing creative forms of writing, drawing, and crafting.