The Stayer, as a sociological and phenomenological type, emerges when people choose to remain rooted in their homeland and community while experiencing their familiar world becoming alien through disruption. While it applies to various contexts where people collectively face the fundamental disruption, war-torn cities represent the classical manifestation of this condition - where transformation is sudden, visible, and confronts entire populations with the fundamental choice of departure or staying. This case constitutes my doctoral thesis and serves as the primary empirical investigation of the Stayer framework.
Context: The full-scale stage of the Russo-Ukrainian war started on February 24, 2022.
Sample: Among the many possible embodiments of staying, this study focuses on intellectuals – a distinct group marked by high public engagement and recognizable professional communities. Their exceptional reflective capacities and habit of documenting personal experience make their writing a unique source for interpretive wartime research. Specifically, I focus on Ukrainian intellectuals, who form recognizable professional communities, being not just individuals who write, but groups that think, act, and reflect within a shared horizon – a necessary condition of the Stayer as a social type. Intellectuals also represent the group with perhaps the most variable opportunities to relocate during disruption, being highly mobile and having significant potential to find new positions in academia or cultural institutions worldwide. This makes them constitute probably the purest example of staying by choice rather than constraint.
Data: Published diaries, memoirs, and essays written after February 24, 2022. From 350+ volumes of war diaries published since 2022, I extract specific chapters and fragments depicting the experience of staying according to the operationalization criteria of this concept, excluding sections about evacuation, front-line experiences, etc. Additional data includes later social media posts by the same authors and subsequent interviews.
Methodology: Thematic qualitative analysis guided by the Social Phenomenology of Disruption -- my interpretive framework that inverts classical phenomenology's assumption of a stable lifeworld to examine how meaning emerges when disruption becomes the baseline of experience. The coding focuses on the phenomenologically salient aspects of the staying suggested by this framework: forced epoché (constant conscious deliberation about previously automatic actions), ambivalent normality (merging the boundaries between what is considered normal and abnormal), and ambivalent belonging (simultaneous groundedness and alienation within the disrupted homeland). These preliminary insights emerged during my pilot study, and I expect additional patterns to emerge. In turn, these findings contribute back to refining the Stayer concept and broader theories of estrangement.
This work is currently under peer review for publication. To cite this page please use:
Yasna, I. The Stayer Project. Research Website, August 15, 2025. https://thestayer.org