Welcome to The Stayer Project! 

This website presents my ongoing doctoral research, The Stayer: Sociality and Knowledge in Disrupted Worlds, being conducted at the Graduate School for Social Research, Polish Academy of Sciences.

Problem statement. The project investigates sociality and practical knowledge under collective borderline conditions of radical disruption and instability, such as wars, occupations, violent political regimes, pandemics, staying in climate-threatened regions, depopulating rural areas, or destroying city districts. Despite the prominence of mobility, displacement, and migration in both social theory and empirical research, the vast majority of people remain in place, and communities continue to inhabit their worlds even under such disruptive conditions. This makes prolonged collective staying under radical disruption and instability a widespread and increasingly characteristic condition of contemporary life, affecting hundreds of millions of people worldwide. 

Existing research pays minimal interest to those “simply staying" at their shattered homes, focusing on displacement, refugees, and veterans, or tends to address this condition in negative terms – as trauma, coping, and bare survival. Yet, practice paints the opposite picture: everyday life continues even amidst the most intense warfare, social order persists, morality does not dissolve, and social life does not turn into a war of all against all. Moreover, individual and collective agency and social integrity often increase, and new forms of communal action arise.  

May we then think of war and other societal catastrophes as a state that "suspends morality" (Levinas) and collapses social life into mere survival? Or should we rather assume that although being "the realm of uncertainty" (Clausewitz), these are "socially transformative conditions," non-reducible to struggle and violence (Lubkemann)? How we answer this question has consequences beyond this project: it determines whether war and other massive disruptions can be theorized as social conditions with their own internal logic — rather than merely as breakdowns of the social.

Research questions. This shift of focus pushes us toward essential theoretical questions that remain almost untouched both in classical and modern sociological thought. 
- How do communities sustain shared meanings, social order, collective knowledge, and everyday orientation when instability and disruption become not an episode but a permanent condition of everyday life?
- What social and epistemic practices allow communities staying amidst disruption to make this condition livable and to not descend into a state of pure survival, savagery, and chaos?
- And ultimately, what social type and collective identity does this condition produce?
Without such understanding, we cannot adequately grasp conditions that are no longer exceptional but increasingly widespread.

Theoretical foundations. To theorize this condition, the project makes two theoretical contributions.

- First, it constructs a genealogy of sociological boundary figures — a constellation of conceptual figures rarely placed under the same roof: from the classical Stranger to related figures of marginality, voluntary or forced mobility, outsideness and exclusion, or belonging to several social worlds simultaneously. Continuing this genealogy, the project introduces a new boundary figure — the Stayer, which inverts the classical configuration and invites us to reconsider the concept of boundaries in sociology: it is not an individual detached from a stable community, but an entire community remaining in place and continuing everyday life while their shared world becomes unstable and is continuously shattered across multiple dimensions.

- To analyze what this condition does to shared knowledge and collective orientation, the project draws on phenomenological sociology — and this requires a second inversion. A rich tradition stretching from Husserl and Schutz to recent work on sociality and collective experience has developed detailed accounts of shared meaning-making and collective orientation — yet consistently within conditions of normal everyday life. The project readjusts this perspective toward conditions of radical instability and invites us to reconsider the very limits of applicability of social phenomenology.

Together, these two inversions place both source perspectives — phenomenological sociology and the genealogy of boundary figures — into a context of radical disruption, for which neither was originally intended.. 

Operationalization. The project develops an approach to analyzing the condition of staying articulated within the theoretical framework. 
- First, it operationalizes the Stayer as a social configuration along two analytical axes: a macro-level specification of the contexts of massive and durable disruption that enable the Stayer condition to emerge, and a micro-level specification of who counts as a Stayer within them. These axes provide criteria for empirical case selection across different historical and social settings.
- Second, it offers a set of sensitizing concepts derived from the theoretical framework and adjusted through the pilot empirical study. 
Together, these two contributions make the theoretical framework empirically tractable — providing criteria for case selection and analytical tools for empirical inquiry.

Theoretical model. The project elaborates on the interpretive sociological theory with middle-range scope. It defines a specific type of social condition which produces a specific social figure; both can be empirically identified through a set of operational criteria and investigated through a set of sensitizing concepts.  

Key concepts. The theoretical core of the project is based on the conceptual pair:  
- Collective boundary condition is a type of socio-historical condition of (i) massive multi-dimensional disruption of normal social order that (ii) persists beyond initial shock and becomes a durable horizon of everyday life, and (iii) is experienced collectively by local communities, nations, or humanity as a whole. It designates a context that constitutes the condition of possibility for the emergence of the Stayer. 
- The Stayer is a collective sociological boundary figure; a social form, designating communities that (i) physically stay in place, (ii) remain embedded in their affected social world, and (iii) are engaged in everyday life and continue ordinary everyday practices under collective boundary condition. 

Scope and empirical referents. This theory encompasses conditions of radical and durable breakdown of normal order, affecting all domains of collective life – such as wars, occupations, violent political regimes, staying in climate-threatened regions, depopulating rural areas, or destroying city districts. Applies where disruption becomes a persistent horizon of everyday life, not an episodic event. 

Core problem: the theory addresses the persistence and transformation of social order, sociality, shared knowledge, collective orientation, and everyday intelligibility under conditions of massive disruption – specifically, how these are maintained when the taken-for-granted background of everyday life is durably destabilized.  

Key proposition: under conditions of instability, communal life is not reduced to chaos or bare survival; social order persists, “normal” everyday life continues, and collective agency often increases. 

Mechanism and outcome: when massive disruption breaks the taken-for-granted order of everyday life, people can no longer rely on habitual routines and implicit knowledge to navigate their world. To continue living, communities continuously restore orientation and reconstruct their shared world through a set of interconnected processes: 
- Under collective borderline condition, the taken-for-granted structures of everyday life are destabilized across multiple domains and over an extended period of time, becoming a persistent horizon of collective existence. 
- People become aware that familiar reality no longer “works” as before (disorientation and defamiliarization). 
- They begin to notice and reflect on what was previously automatic and unquestioned (forced epoché – the collectively experienced, situationally imposed suspension of the taken-for-granted). 
- They continue everyday practices while simultaneously adapting them to unstable conditions, producing a constant tension or ambivalence – the irresolvable coexistence of two states or realities – “normal” and disrupted. 
- They repeatedly redefine what counts as “normal,” “safe,” or “livable” in changing circumstances (ongoing renegotiation of normality). 
- Through these processes, communities actively reconstruct their shared world — restoring social intelligibility, repairing collective orientation, and sustaining everyday life under altered conditions.  
- As a result, social order does not collapse but persists in a transformed form; everyday life continues under altered conditions, and new forms of collective identity emerge from this shared work of sustaining a livable world. 
 

Empirical cases and research design. The project is conceived as a broader research agenda, which I plan to advance during the postdoc stage, rather than a single empirical study. The Stayer framework can be applied across different contexts of disruption, from war and occupation to environmental crises and infrastructural decline; and is compatible with a wide range of empirical designs and analytical strategies. 

War case. The present doctoral study develops the first empirical instantiation of this agenda based on the case of Russia's full-scale war against Ukraine. It introduces the concept of narrative reconstruction of reality – one of the forms of the reconstruction of reality intrinsic to the Stayer condition – and explores it through a theory-driven qualitative analysis of civilian wartime diaries (2022-2026).
The dissertation develops a corpus approach to this data. Unlike most diary-based research, which draws on several sources read in depth, this study constructs a systematic corpus of publicly shared civilian wartime diaries, treating them not as individual testimonies but as a collective source. This makes visible the collective narrative work of a community under disruption, which no single testimony can provide. 

Occupation case. Alongside the dissertation, my parallel study applies the same framework to the situation of staying under occupation of Ukrainian territories through in-depth interviews, which extends the agenda to a different context and data type, and demonstrates the framework's transferability beyond the doctoral study.).

Interdisciplinarity and transferability. The Stayer framework is interdisciplinary by constitution. Theoretically, it draws on classical and contemporary sociology, social phenomenology, and sociology of knowledge. The empirical design engages with literary and diary studies, narrative theory, and corpus methodology. And practically, the project extends into digital humanities and living archives scholarship. 

Although this doctoral study addresses a concrete case (civilian staying in during full-scale Russia’s war against Ukraine) and utilizes a concrete methodological approach (phenomenologically oriented qualitative analysis of the corpus of public wartime diaries), the framework remains theoretically and methodologically open. It can be applied across different contexts of disruption, from war and occupation to environmental crises and infrastructural decline. It is also compatible with a wide range data types and analytical strategies – from narrative and discourse analysis to oral histories, interviews, mixed-method approaches, and even surveys. 

The project, thus, underlies broader research agenda. which I plan to advance during the postdoc stage.

Resources
- Versioned record of this research description: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18036611
- Project website: https://thestayer.org
- Project repository: https://zenodo.org/communities/thestayer
- Author’s ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2023-9732