Crisis Oral History and the Asylum Timescape: Temporalities, Solidarities, and Affect in Interviews with Ukrainians with Temporary Protection in Italy

This article reflects on how “crisis oral history” can illuminate layered, nonlinear temporal experiences of displacement and resettlement. I draw on interviews I recorded with Ukrainians displaced to Italy in what the Italian government termed the emergenza ucraina, or Ukrainian emergency, following Russia’s 2022 invasion. I discuss how narrators with temporary protection status represent or reflect on crisis time and its affective dimensions. Applying the concept of “asylum timescape” (from Meier and Donà) to contexts of reception, I demonstrate how crisis oral history can create narrative space for making visible the converging temporal and affective experiences that shape individual lives as well as emergent placemaking and counter-temporalizing practices. At a Ukrainian church in Rome, narrators layered past and future onto the limbo of the present; in Sicily, a Ukrainian woman and her Italian host shared narrative space and time in ways that demonstrated forms of placemaking. In reading interviews in temporal terms, I aim to expand the area of “crisis oral history” to include consideration of the asylum timescape, focusing on how multiple coinciding temporalities shape people’s experiences of what we think of as “aftermath” or as the limbo of reception in another country. My discussion emphasizes that, given how experiences of time shape narratives of displacement, transit, and reception, oral history can play a key role in documenting periods understood as crisis and in elucidating crisis time.