Making sense of forced migration: the scenarios of meaning-seeking among Ukrainian migrant women in Poland

Abstract This article discusses how Ukrainian women search for meaning to cope with the state of liminality caused by forced migration after the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022. While meaning-making has been widely examined in psychology, less is known about how forced migrants seek meaning in relation to their lived experiences. This study examines how Ukrainian women seek meaning in situations of forced migration (‘situational meaning’) and incorporate these experiences into their lives in ways aligned with experiential, creative, and attitudinal values (‘global meaning’). Drawing on qualitative case studies based on 20 in-depth interviews, we identify three different scenarios of meaning-making, which constitute the article’s contribution: (1) restoring previous meaning, (2) activating latent or postponed ones, and (3) discovering new forms of meaning. We show that these mechanisms of meaning-making are not merely individual strategies but are shaped by social relations and structural conditions in the new socio-political context.