Knowledge holder-led inquiry in sanctuary spaces with Ukrainian newcomers and diaspora in Edmonton, Alberta

1 Introduction

Following Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, Canada received over one million applications to its Canada-Ukraine Authorization for Emergency Travel (CUAET) visa (Government of Canada, 2024a). Policy-wise, CUAET was unprecedented as it allowed Ukrainians to live, work, and study in Canada for up to three years (Ibrahim, 2022). While this pathway threw open Canada's borders, Canada's settlement system was left scrambling to support the tens of thousands of refugees (although not labelled as such and therefore, not supported as such) that arrived in the first few months (Clark-Kazak, cited in Boisvert, 2022). Scholars have explored how the existing Ukrainian diaspora stepped up to fill the settlement gap left by the CUAET program's temporary status framework (Hyndman, 2024), alongside the lived experiences of newcomers navigating a settlement context that exposed longstanding resettlement issues: credential recognition barriers, difficulties accessing settlement services or healthcare (Al-Hamad et al., 2024b). Researchers have also documented experiences of sexism among Ukrainian women (Al-Hamad et al., 2024a), and the structural vulnerabilities created by the CUAET system, in particular, the lack of a clear immigration pathway to permanent residence (Jeziorek, 2024). While goodwill opened Canada's borders, researchers have made the case that the structural supports that make Canada's settlement sustainable, were an afterthought.

Scholars using participatory and creative methods with newcomers have demonstrated that conventional survey and interview approaches tend to produce sanitized accounts of settlement, with newcomers often suppressing difficult emotions for fear of appearing ungrateful to their host country (Cubero et al., 2024; Lenette, 2022). When newcomers were instead invited to express their inner lives through creative, participatory, visual self-documentation, a more layered picture emerged: one of blended and contradictory emotions, including grief, fear, and a pervasive sense of status loss that surfaces less often in standardized instruments (Schulman et al., 2019). This points to both the limitations of conventional methods for understanding displacement experiences and the potential value of creative and participatory approaches for research with migrants facing intersectional barriers.

Drawing on Lenette's (2019) concept of sanctuary¹ as both theoretical frame and methodological commitment, this paper examines how a community-created space (the Free Store for Ukrainian Newcomers in Edmonton, referred to as “the Free Store”) functioned as a site of collective meaning-making for forced migrants (who we will call recent Ukrainian newcomers) navigating the structural barriers of the CUAET program and the emotional rollercoaster of resettlement. Lenette developed the sanctuary concept in relation to arts-based methods with refugees to Australia, and we extend it to the unique social and political context of Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. This sanctuary (the Free Store) emerged not from researcher design but from community initiative as the Free Store's co-Director initiated this research. In this paper, we argue that the Free Store functioned as the originating sanctuary for this research (establishing trust and relationships that made knowledge-holder-led inquiry possible) and that this sanctuary proved mobile and relational rather than fixed, as it travelled with participants across research encounters and returned to the community through the knowledge it produced. This paper's contribution to the literature on participatory and creative methods with recent Ukrainian migrants is to document how the sanctuary becomes a relational condition, rather than fixed space.

We begin by situating our research in Edmonton's specific policy and community context, before introducing the Free Store for Ukrainian Newcomers as the sanctuary space at the heart of this project. We then set out our key theoretical concepts that include sanctuary, community, and multi-sited embeddedness, before describing our positionality as researchers and the two participant groups we worked with. The methods section accounts for each data collection approach in turn, connecting our methodological choices to what they made analytically possible. Findings are presented across three methods before the discussion, which returns to the special issue's broader themes of participatory and creative research methodologies in migration research.

2 The Edmonton and project context

According to the Government of Canada (2024a), approximately 31% (298,128) of those migrants with approved CUAET visas (962,612) made the journey to Canada (as of April 1, 2024). Speculations as to this “low uptake” have identified Ukrainians applying to CUAET as a back-up plan (there was no cost associated with the application) (AAISA, 2024, p. 6), the high travel costs to Canada, and Ukraine's martial law that restricted men's ability to leave the country (The Canadian Magazine of Immigration, 2026). Arrivals largely followed established pathways from previous Ukrainian migrations, with large numbers setting in Alberta and Manitoba (USC Toronto, 2026). However, this wave was notably different in terms of speed, scale, and demographics as there were more women, children, and elderly people than in past migrations (Government of Canada, 2024b). According to the Alberta Association of Immigrant Serving Agencies [AAISA], nearly 50,000 Ukrainians² registered for provincial health coverage (one of the few demographic markers available at this time), 31% of whom (or approximately 20,000) registered in Edmonton, by April 2024 (2025). As the CUAET program wound down at the end of March 2024, Alberta's Premier advocated for more Ukrainian newcomers to settle in Alberta (through first and secondary migration pathways) to help address the province's labour shortage (CPAC, 2024). Thus, for many reasons, Alberta (particularly Calgary and Edmonton) became a popular destination for recent migrants from Ukraine.

The CUAET visa was a truly unique program in Canada's migration policy history (as scholars have noted and critiqued, see for example, Hyndman, 2024; Ly and Boyd, 2025). Unlike other Canadian immigration programs, CUAET had no quotas, did not require those seeking entry to produce identity documents, and it extended admissions to non-Ukrainian family members (Silverman, 2022). Relocated Ukrainians were also given an open and flexible work permit (meaning they could change jobs) that lasted up to three years (Silverman, 2022), which is 2.5 years longer than other temporary visas.

On March 22, 2022, the National President of the Ukrainian Canadian Congress (UCC), Alexandra Chyczij, highlighted this gap: “It is naïve to assume that a population of women and children, traumatized by war, will be able to find immediate shelter, secure employment, and access services” (2022, para. 3). The UCC's Chief Executive Officer Ihor Michalchyshyn shared stories of some Ukrainian newcomers arriving in Canada and having to “wander airports” as they were “unclear where to turn for help” (Marhnouj, 2022, para. 2, 3). Michalchyshyn also stated that “While [the Ukrainian Canadian Congress] community is eager to help…, we're not professional settlement agencies. We don't have the resources or experience to deal with thousands of people in a systematic way” (Marhnouj, 2022, para. 12). It appears that the unprecedented nature of the CUAET program (in terms of its pace and breadth) resulted in limited access to federally-funded support services that typically help refugees and newcomers with permanent residency status find housing, work, and language classes (Marhnouj, 2022, para. 5; see also Braun and Clément, 2023 for more information about historical funding issues). Typical areas that newcomers struggle with are language acquisition, employment, affordable housing and childcare, and navigating health care (AAISA, 2025, p. 5).

While there are 92 formally recognized agencies that support immigrants across Alberta (AAISA, 2025, p. 7), Ukrainian CUAET arrivals were initially ineligible for these services due to their status as “temporary residents” rather than refugees. Although the federal government extended the settlement program soon after (within weeks), the practical capacity to deliver services lagged considerably behind the policy announcement (Government of Canada, 2022).

Many Canadians, including a large contingent of Canadians with Ukrainian heritage, stepped in to this support service gap and aid the integration and settlement of Ukrainians arriving in Canada. Refugee studies scholar Jennifer Hyndman has called this public humanitarian response “salient and unprecedented” and explains that as a nation, Canada's response is in large part due to its “sizeable, well-organized and influential” Ukrainian diaspora (2024, p. 1, 9).

There are 1.36 million Ukrainian-Canadians, amounting to roughly 4% of the national population, thanks to past recruitment programs by the Canadian government in the 19th and 20th centuries (Hyndman, 2024, p. 9). Canada now holds the largest Ukrainian diaspora outside of Ukraine and Russia (Paas-Lang, 2023, para. 14). Having come essentially as temporary economic migrants, most Ukrainian-Canadians could draw on their strong “educational and employment profiles, as well as higher occupational skills” (Stick and Hou, 2022). As a well-connected diaspora, those who chose to mobilize their networks and resources made a significant impact. Here in Edmonton, for example, we learned that donors raised enough money to send two planes with humanitarian aid to Ukraine, they facilitated the Ukrainian Newcomer Furniture Warehouse that provided free household goods to Ukrainian newcomers for two years, and many Ukrainian community organizations changed focus to collect and redistribute materials and resources to Ukrainian newcomers. These cultural and community organizations leveraged and coordinated their efforts through municipal, provincial, and national platforms. To give a sense of the scale of these efforts, the Canada-Ukraine Foundation (CUF) and the UCC raised more than $52 million dollars in a single appeal for financial support that came from over 70,000 different donors (Hyndman, 2024, p. 9).

This project was stoked to life after the first author received a call from the co-Director of the Free Store in late 2023. The goal of our research was to explore recent Ukrainian newcomers' experiences resettling in Edmonton, Alberta and to uncover the motivations of second-generation (and above) Edmontonians with Ukrainian ancestry who were involved in contemporary efforts for resettlement.

2.1 The Free Store for Ukrainian newcomers as sanctuary

Janice Krissa-Moore was the co-Director (with her daughter) of the Free Store for Ukrainian Newcomers in Edmonton (The Free Store). The Free Store was a space where “Ukrainian newcomers could shop for free for things like winter coats, shoes and essentials” (Lamb and Bremness, 2023, para. 1). The goal of this store was to “hand up, not hand out” (Lamb and Bremness, 2023, para. 2), as Ms. Krissa-Moore is well-aware (through her experience supporting resettlement) of the importance of providing individualized choice and re-establishing dignity in newcomer settlement and service provision. This community knowledge follows existing scholarly research concerning barriers to integration of refugees in Canada (Forte et al., 2019; Ghahari et al., 2020; Hakiza, 2014). The Free Store also provided a space for community connection and belonging, not just among Ukrainian newcomers, but also Edmontonians with Ukrainian heritage who were volunteering their time and resources to support new Ukrainian arrivals. Immigration scholars from across the social sciences have long demonstrated the importance of building host community contacts and connections as a key facilitator and support for newcomer integration (Agrawal and Sangapala, 2021; Costigan et al., 2022; Oudshoorn et al., 2020).

The authors' collaborative model integrated community collaborators [Krissa-Moore and MacEwan University's Ukrainian Resource and Development Centre's (URDC) director, Larysa Hayduk] in each aspect of the project from development of research questions to the co-development of knowledge mobilization plans and outcomes (Canadian Science Publishing, n.d.). Intermittent steps included co-development of data collection approach and tools, identifying and organizing willing participants in the local community, participating in data collection efforts, collaborative analysis of anonymized data, and drafting community outputs.

3 Key concepts: community and multi-sited embeddedness

Our theoretical approach is grounded in Lenette's (2019) concept of sanctuary as well as her definition of community. In her book, Arts-Based Methods in Refugee Research (2019), Lenette argues that Knowledge Holders' (Ukrainian newcomers displaced by the war in our study) perspectives should guide research from conceptualization (like research questions) through to knowledge dissemination (meaningful, as defined by the community, outputs). Integrating what O'Neill (2010) calls “purposeful knowledge” rather than decontextualized academic analysis, Lenette warns researchers not to tokenize community voices, centering Arundhati Roy's perspective that “there's really no such thing as voiceless people, only those who are deliberately silenced or preferably unheard” (2019, p. 17). This distinction shapes how we understand our role as researchers in relation to recent migrants from Ukraine, Ukrainian-Edmontonian diaspora members, and those of us situated within Edmonton institutions like MacEwan University.

To understand what holds these three groups together as a community, we draw on Horst's (2018) concept of multi-sited embeddedness, understood as belonging to and engaging in multiple communities simultaneously, where civic engagement stems from belonging while belonging is actively formed through community engagement (p. 1341). Horst argues that such embeddedness need not be reducible to shared ethnicity or national identity, and that a shared sense of humanity can equally underpin the urge to assist and to act together (2018, p. 1346). This is precisely what we observed in Edmonton, where the impulse to support recent migrants from Ukraine, drew together people with deep Ukrainian heritage, recent arrivals still connected to Ukraine, and institutionally situated Edmontonians without Ukrainian ancestry, all embedded in overlapping local, national, and transnational communities of concern. The Free Store made this multi-sited, multi-generational community visible in a single physical space, and it was in this space that the conditions Lenette (2019) describes for Knowledge Holder-led inquiry emerged organically from community initiative rather than research design. Those conditions include trust, sensitivity, flexibility, and freedom from burden of proof.

Ethnographic research by Schulman et al. (2019) found that the refugee resettlement experiences involved mixed emotions, which included joy, fear, sadness, surprise, anticipation, anger, and boredom that show up as a rollercoaster or blend of emotions (Schulman et al., 2019, p. 24–25). The authors of this paper wanted to make space in the in-depth interviews with newcomers for these emotions, as recent newcomers experience individual- and societal-level barriers when adjusting to a new context. Individual-level barriers include a loss of control (in one's own life) and status (often coupled with idleness, otherness, and sleeplessness) (Ghahari et al., 2020). Societal-level barriers to belonging include family and community separation, all the issues that plague Canada's resettlement process (such as the requirement for Canadian experience, cost of living, citizenship rights), and culture shock (Al-Hamad et al., 2023; Schulman et al., 2019).

To analyze the knowledge produced in and through this space, we used a narrative approach as described by George and Selimos (2018) that emphasizes both the meaning and content of participants' stories, attends to how and where such stories are told, and treats participants' accounts as having “temporal”, “spatial”, and “sequential ordering” (p. 6). Such an approach keeps each participants' account intact as the unit of analysis and prioritizes the teller's own meaning-making, which aligns with commitments of Knowledge Holder-led inquiry and Lenette's (2019) sanctuary framing. This attention to temporal and spatial ordering also fits our visual timeline and mobile life story framework (Bjarnesen, 2009), which asks participants to sequence and situate their experiences of displacement and resettlement (see In-Depth Interviews with Ukrainian Newcomers). Finally, George and Selimos’ narrative approach treats the research process, the social and historical context, and the reflexive positioning of the researcher as part of the analysis rather than as background. For example, we think it is meaningful that the second author migrated to Edmonton from Ukraine, though under different circumstances than those who arrived following the invasion. We highlight our situated perspectives and demonstrate how knowledge is produced as something shaped and revealed. We believe such an approach keeps Lenette's (2019) caution (that positioning arts-based and participatory methods as innovative and ethical does not automatically make them so) front-of-mind, and we remain committed to critical reflexivity about power, representation, and positionality at every stage of the research process.

Before we begin describing our methods and their outcome, we first provide a brief overview of our own situated perspectives in relation to this community. We then provide a composite³ of the two groups we worked with (Ukrainian newcomers and Ukrainian-Edmontonians). It is important to acknowledge how using a composite might “dull the edges” and work against our stated goal of listening and learning from specific voices. We have constructed these composites to guard anonymity and give an overarching sense as to who participated in our research, while preserving direct quotations in our data section from individuals, using pseudonyms. The Ukrainian-Edmontonian diaspora participants are “nearly-nameable” from context, a matter which was predicted due to their public-facing work and confirmed during the consent process. The diaspora's situatedness is different from newcomers and we treat it as such, which is common in other similarly constructed work (Banerjee, 2026). Further, our methods and knowledge dissemination tactics shift in scope (zoom in and out and back again) from individual to group to individual. This methodological approach (for example, we asked in-depth interview participants to craft their own timeline, then we built a timeline that represented multiple perspectives around leaving Ukraine for Edmonton, Alberta, and then, created activities for viewers of this research to engage with the timeline on a personal basis) was also key to understand how individual perspectives met with communal understanding, and back again. This is a deliberate approach to engaging individuals while representing specific ideas and beliefs is part of the way we again, hold reflexivity and accountability in mind throughout the entire research process.

4 Situated community perspectives

4.1 Sofiia

The second author, Sofiia, was at the time of this research, an undergraduate research assistant (now graduate) and Ukrainian national. She speaks Ukrainian, Russian, and English and occupied a particular position in this research. These linguistic competencies and shared cultural background and contextual memory, facilitate trust and rapport with participants who had experienced displacement following Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Sofiia's ability to conduct in-depth interviews and participate in photovoice workshops in whichever language was most comfortable for participants shaped our research team's interactions in terms of what and how they shared. In those difficult emotional memories, participants could share their experiences in depth, using their native language, and take part in a mix of languages. Sofiia's migration experience is different from that of the research participants. She came to Canada in September 2021 as an international student, six months before the invasion, under comparatively stable political and legal conditions, and has since gained greater educational and institutional security than many arrivals in early 2022. This situatedness is important to acknowledge as it is not forced displacement. However, Sofiia remains closely connected to the ongoing realities of war and the experiences of family members, friends and others living through it. This closeness is created through connection and asymmetry with others, sharing cultural memories on the one hand, and meaningful differences on the other.

4.2 Jennifer

The first author, Jennifer, is an associate professor at MacEwan University with expertise in qualitative and community-engaged research methods. Unlike Sofiia, she does not speak Ukrainian or Russian, which naturally shaped the kind of access and connection she has to the community. Her ability to co-design and conduct this research hinged on her collaboration with Sofiia, whose language and research skills facilitated key access, connection, and understanding of this community and this project's participants. Jennifer's entry into the community came through an invitation from Janice Krissa-Moore, co-Director of the Free Store, whose trust opened doors that would not otherwise have been available without direct ties to the Ukrainian community. Her own family's history of migration, while different in scale and context from the experiences of participants, informs her methodological commitment to understand resettlement as an emotional and relational process. Jennifer's position at MacEwan was key to applying and receiving grant funding, ethics approval, and enabled access to research spaces including university facilities where, for example, the photovoice workshop was held. Jennifer's role in this project was as a methodological facilitator, someone who contributed to the conditions of knowledge gathering, led by those who live it, shared out to broader networks.

4.3 Participants across the community

The community we engaged with in this project came together through the shared spatial and political circumstance of forced migration to Canada (Edmonton specifically) following Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine and the Ukrainian-Edmontonian diaspora's responsive mobilization. Our multiple methods engaged two distinct groups of participants which we describe below as composites to convey the texture (stories, insights, and characteristics) of who they were, while protecting their identities.

Our in-depth interview participants (n = 15) were predominantly women (twelve of fifteen) and ranged in ages from 18 to 62, with most participants in their thirties and forties. Most were married (eleven of fifteen), and all had arrived through the CUAET program. They came from across Ukraine, including heavily war-affected eastern and southern regions such as Kharkiv, Luhansk, and Kherson, as well as central and western cities. As a group, they were highly educated with all but one holding post-secondary or professional qualifications including post-graduate degrees. Their pre-migration occupations spanned engineering, medicine, psychology, education, skilled trades, project management, and the arts. After arriving in Canada, many of their credentials were not recognized or considered insufficient for jobs in their field, resulting in a significant downward displacement from their professional standing in Ukraine (Al-Hamad et al., 2024b). Many took on 'survival jobs' in and outside their area of expertise (Thakur, 2026), and participants in our study also described taking on informal cash-in-hand work. While the work paid for families to live, they negatively affected their ability to transition into work in their field (as their skills became outdated, for example) and, as we later learned, these employers were unwilling to sign documents attesting to their work that would allow these newcomers to work toward permanent residence.

Several of our participants came as a multigenerational family, making the decision to come to Canada with their spouse, children, or (grand)parents. Many were not first-wave arrivals but spent time in western Ukraine or other European countries such as Czech Republic, Poland, or Germany, before coming to Canada. To this point, Canada was not always their first choice of destination, revealing how exhaustion, prior adaptation, and the making and remaking of decisions crept into our data. Their English language capabilities varied greatly from those who were fluent, and as such carried the burden of paperwork, navigating services, and full-time translator for their family, to those for whom English was a significant barrier. Despite these differences, the participants shared similar hopes about safety, stability, and the possibility for a better future for themselves and notably their children in Edmonton. We found that there was a gap between these hopes and the everyday realities of the settlement system, where issues with credential recognition, finding gainful or meaningful employment, social isolation, and the emotional labour of weathering “the resettlement rollercoaster” often exacted a heavy price.

The diaspora participants (n = 25, across five focus groups) were predominantly women (seventeen of twenty-five) and who were older than the newcomers, with ages ranging from 20s to 80s, and an average age of 53. They were multi-generational Canadians, but most (twelve of twenty-five) self-identified as third generation, with others selecting first to fourth generation. Several described their roots as spanning multiple generations consistent with family histories reaching back to the twentieth century. The majority self-identified as Ukrainian Canadian (fourteen of twenty-five), while others described themselves as Canadian (or Canadian first in a hyphenated ethnic identity), or, in one case, a triple mix of ethnic identities that included Ukrainian. Regardless of their self-identified ethnic identity, most focus group participants framed their support for newcomers through family migration stories or in one case, a belief that Ukrainians had superior work ethic. As a group, they were well-educated and professionally established with most holding a university or post-secondary degree, with occupations spanning skilled trades, business and entrepreneurship, public service and policing, software engineering, teaching, nursing, and creative and communication fields. Seventeen were currently employed, and participants described themselves as either middle or upper-middle class. As mentioned above, this group was well-resourced and deeply embedded in Edmonton's institutions, whether through Ukrainian cultural organizations or the mobilization of their own informal networks.

This group was not associated by a particular organization but instead, had a shared sense of urgency about the moment and acted well outside official avenues to support Ukrainian newcomers in entrepreneurial ways. One striking finding from the focus groups with the diaspora was how much parallel and disconnected efforts were underway. There were individuals who built new ventures, opened their businesses, or redirected their volunteer efforts to support Ukrainian newcomers (as opposed to other recent newcomers). Some worked solely or intermittently with formal Ukrainian cultural infrastructure, while others experienced these established channels as too slow or closed to them. Many became the hub of a new network, for example, as organizer of a Facebook group helping newcomers find host families, a resource redistribution network, a phone tree to pick up arrivals at the airport. Although many donated monetarily to Ukrainian war efforts, these were active architects of an improvised settlement system that grew up in the cracks left by formal policy, which was shaped by the personal histories and resources (and limitations) of each participant.

5 Engaged methodology

This research was collaborative in several ways and responded to a community need as identified and facilitated by community members. This community came together through a shared spatial and political set of circumstances that brought together individuals from around the world. As stated previously, Horst's concept of the multi-sited embeddedness helps us understand how community membership can be multiple, far-reaching, and forged through engagement that sparks relationality (2018). This frame allows us to integrate three different positionalities at the nexus of newcomer resettlement: those forcibly displaced newcomers, the existing Ukrainian diaspora living in Edmonton, and institutionally situated researchers and community organizers. Each facet of our methodological approach brought something unique to a space prioritizing situated, relational Knowledge Holder experiences about resettlement, which traditional approaches could not.

After Krissa-Moore and the first author spoke in late 2023, they formalized a guiding partnership with MacEwan's URDC, developed research questions, and successfully applied to a community-engaged research grant. The second author was then hired, and together the team designed a data collection approach that drew on our respective and complementary forms of community and methodological expertise. This approach was both pragmatic and iterative, as it was shaped by community need and available capacities. We understand this flexibility as a strength of community-engaged work rather than a weakness, following the editors of this special issue, who argue that participatory methods require adaptation and responsiveness, while remaining committed to ethical practice (Santana de Andrade et al., 2026).

Our data collection engaged participants in three ways. Ukrainian-Edmontonian diaspora members participated in focus groups, which allowed us to understand both individual perspectives and the relational dynamics of a loosely connected community mobilizing around a shared circumstance. Recent Ukrainian newcomers participated in in-depth interviews that drew on Bjarnesen's (2009) mobile life story framework to focus on the “vital conjuncture” of displacement and resettlement, rather than their story from birth, and incorporated visual timelines as a creative output. This latter approach invited participants to narrate the year leading up to the invasion, their experiences of preparing for migration, and their journey up until the present day in Edmonton. Another subset of recent migrants from Ukraine (all but two of whom also took part in the in-depth interviews) took part in a photovoice workshop where they used pictures and photographs to narrate their relationship with home in the past, present and future. These workshops took place in collective settings, and the output was compiled into a co-designed book shared back with and throughout the community. Like Santana de Andrade et al. (2026), we drew on both traditional qualitative methods (participant observation at community events, focus groups, and in-depth interviews) and participatory methods (photovoice workshops). While creative elements were present across both traditional (timelines) and participatory (photovoice) approaches, each was adapted to suit the context and population. These methodological choices formed a varied and responsive approach that allowed individuals and collectives to share their experiences in a manner that showcased, rather than summarized, their experiences.

The following sections describe each of these methods in turn, connecting our methodological choices to their theoretical and analytical outcomes, and reflect our commitment to helping to address resettlement experiences in real time. We moved from more traditional to creative and participatory methods, from data collection to knowledge dissemination practices so that findings were returned to the communities that generated them and shared further still.

6 Methods

6.1 Collecting data in sanctuary spaces

This section describes each of our methods in turn. We connect methodological choices to what they made possible analytically and in terms of our commitment to affecting the settlement experiences of recently arrived newcomers in real time. Before this, we want to make the case that where we worked, was itself a methodological choice that shaped everything else.

Lenette (2019) argues that sanctuary is foundational to ethical arts-based research with refugees. In her preface, she explains that she wanted researchers to “carve out space for methods and approaches that are collaborative, ethical and culturally safe for everyone engaged in research endeavors – for the holders of knowledge, as well as collaborators and scholars” (2019, p. xii), and she describes research spaces “that offer sanctuary amid the complications of everyday life” (p. xx), as a precondition for Knowledge Holder-led inquiry. The Free Store embodied these conditions organically because members of the Ukrainian diaspora built this space to offer Ukrainian newcomers somewhere they could arrive “as themselves”, find solace, speak their language, accept help without bureaucratic scrutiny, and be with others with similar life experiences. We did not need to create the foundations of a sanctuary because it already existed.

We also found that, for many participants, this feeling of sanctuary was mobile. The trust, comfort, and relational ease associated with the Free Store, whether through direct experience of the space, familiarity with Janice Krissa-Moore, or the community legitimacy she lent to the project, this feeling travelled into other research encounters that followed, from the focus groups and the life history interviews held there in the early months, and later, the interviews and photovoice workshop held at MacEwan University. This resonates with Bjarnesen's (2009) concept of “emplacement”, which maintains that migrants' experiences are always grounded in specific, felt places that give meaning to movement and to the stories told about it. In our work, emplacement was not fixed to a single building but travelled with participants as a relational condition, carried forward through the trust the sanctuary had established, in ways that were not exclusive to the physical space where they were first engendered.

Participant observation is a key research method in anthropology where researchers immerse themselves in a community and engage directly in daily activities to gain in-depth understanding of social interactions and cultural practices (Castree et al., 2013). In this project, participant observation was an ongoing condition of the research itself, rather than a separate data collection activity. Before the authors hosted focus groups or conducted in-depth interviews, they spent time at the Free Store with Krissa-Moore and her team (Krissa-Moore hired recent Ukrainian newcomers – two women – to manage the store's volunteers and outreach) and learned who frequented the space, how it was organized, and began to understand what this space meant for those who used it. Over the course of the project, both authors also attended community events, celebrations, and gathering connected to Krissa-Moore's network, while the second author's repeated presence at the Free Store (making announcements, exchanging contact information, or simply being in the space) meant that the authors became, to differing degrees, part of the community they researched. This matters for Lenette's concept of sanctuary because the conditions to engender trust, over time, begin as a matter of sustained presence, in ways that build relationships with Knowledge Holders.

6.2 Focus groups with Ukrainian-Edmontonian diaspora members

We conducted five focus groups⁴ with members of the Ukrainian-Edmontonian diaspora, who were recruited through a combination of purposive and snowball sampling (Kirner and Mills, 2020). With the help of our community partner Krissa-Moore, we filled five focus groups with 25 individuals between February and June 2024. The purposive component helped us identify individuals who were actively involved in supporting Ukrainian newcomers. Participants from earlier focus groups also reached out to their contacts to help fill later focus groups; this snowball sampling extended our reach into the looser edges of the diaspora network, where there was less communal knowledge about what was happening. Focus groups typically lasted 90 min. Participants shared their thoughts on questions that were important to them. Some groups took turns answering questions one-by-one, while others engaged more conversationally. We recognized that institutionally embedded participants could at times shape the conversation in a particular direction. We addressed this by explicitly inviting quieter voices to share, while reading these dynamics as evidence of how such networks are organized. We stopped recruiting focus group participants once sessions were generating familiar themes, and community contacts were dwindling. Although some had never visited the Free Store before the focus group, the physical setting of an entrepreneurial, community-organized venture oriented around newcomer support appeared to be familiar to them.

Focus groups are particularly well-suited to research with loosely connected communities, where the group encounter itself brings forward knowledge that individual interviews would not (Schensul and LeCompte, 2013). Our sessions revealed a community mobilizing through two parallel tracks operating largely in isolation from one another. Nanette (D3), who had been answering phones at the Ukrainian Canadian Congress (UCC) office from the second day of the invasion, described the scale of what arrived: “It was everything from “I want to go fight in the war” … [to people] offering donations of material goods, housing, clothing, medical supplies, you name it. It was living history”. The phones “never stopped” and the organizations that absorbed those calls were not built for such a function (as they were not a settlement service) or volume. Filipa (D18), who had close connections to another well-established Ukrainian organization in Edmonton, the Ukrainian Canadian Social Services, noted “the UCC was supposed to be getting something together, but it took a year or more”. Therefore, running alongside this formal track, and largely invisible to it, was a diffuse, self-organized informal network of individuals who did not know about the formal structure, felt that they had been turned away by it, or preferred to act outside of it. Kaitlyn (D15), for example, captured the gap among these tracks: “The official organizations weren't helping yet. It took about six months for anything official to happen, but yet, every day people were stepping off the plane”. She had tried to engage with the established organizations early on, but felt she received the cold shoulder (having reached out and never heard back), built her own Facebook page for hosting Ukrainian families in Edmonton that grew to 32,000 members. Peter (D19), a contractor who owned a furniture moving business, offered employment to recent Ukrainian migrants, and described the organic character of the informal response: “When this happened, it happened organically. There was no rule … whereas in our organization it's like, “Can someone write up an agenda for the meeting first?” Betty (D14), a retired police officer who helped furnish dozens of apartments through her own improvised network, put it most directly when someone asked her about how she organized things: “What organization? It's me. I'm the organization”. She had, she jokingly explained, been “extorting, forcing, threatening, and blackmailing” her friends and co-workers into donating, a description that captured something real about how the informal layer worked, driven by personal obligation, humor, and persistent individual and entrepreneurial initiative. In all, focus group respondents revealed how Edmonton's Ukrainian diaspora was in some ways coordinated, and in others, a proliferation of actions by individuals, each doing significant work that were likely less or unknown to the other.

The fact that the diasporic response was, in a word, entrepreneurial carries descriptive and analytical weight. First, it documents the informal and improvised diaspora-led response characterized by entrepreneurial initiative, ethnic loyalty, and multi-generational memory of migration, alongside those formal settlement providers were waiting for funding or overwhelmed. Second, it offers analytical insights into how coordination through personal relationships and individual initiative can move faster and further than some formal institutional channels because they are not constrained by them. For example, participants joined the focus groups and often left with new contacts and offers for collaboration. We witnessed participants asking each other for contact information, sharing planned events with their network and social media pages. Monica (D13), for example, reflected at the end of one session: “I actually wrote [Janice] back and said I have no idea what I can contribute to this at all …[yet] I've learned so much from all of you”. The research encounter itself became, briefly, an opportunity for coordination. In Lenette's terms, the Free Store had provided the feeling of sanctuary for this research, and the focus groups held within it extended that sanctuary outward, creating conditions where individuals who had been working in isolation could recognize their shared purpose and each other.

6.3 In-depth interviews with Ukrainian newcomers

We conducted 15 in-depth interviews with recent Ukrainian migrants, which incorporated a visual timeline as a creative output. Like the focus groups, our community partner helped connect us with willing participants (purposive sampling techniques) who then put us in touch with their connections (snowball sampling). Interviews were conducted over a five-month period from March until July 2024 and lasted between 60 and 90 min. Unlike the focus groups, we stopped collecting data when the research assistantship position ended in August 2024.

Following Gu (2020), in-depth interviewing is a qualitative method conducted as a one-on-one encounter oriented towards understanding the interviewee's perceptions and experiences in depth, where the researcher and participant function as conversational partners and open-ended questions allow for flexible and extended expressions of emotions, experiences, and opinions (p. 566–567). To these in-depth interviews, we integrated what Bjarnesen (2009) calls the mobile life story, which is an adaptation of the life history tradition specifically developed for qualitative migration research that guides the exploration of migrants' subjective experiences across a journey of migration (with boundaries set by the participant), rather than across a whole life. Where classical life history interviews ask participants to narrate their full biography from childhood onward (Gu, 2020), the mobile life story takes its temporal scope from what Bjarnesen, drawing on Johnson-Hanks (2002), calls a “vital conjuncture”, which is “a socially structured zone of possibility that emerges around specific periods of potential transformation” of a life that is characterized by uncertainty and the open-ended nature of what that transformation will turn out to mean (Bjarnesen, 2009, p. 122–123). While we asked these participants a series of questions about migration and resettlement, and about their thoughts on the future of Ukraine and their future in Edmonton, we began the interview by asking our participants to document and then narrate their experiences from the period approximately one year before the invasion through to the present day. We set the starting point at roughly one year before the invasion so that participants could establish a baseline “ordinary life” against which the rupture of February 2022 became legible, which follows Bjarnesen's practice of bounding the narrative around vital conjunctures rather than collecting a whole life history (Bjarnesen, 2009). This graphic illustration of life events organized meaning and mapped the importance of events (McGrath and Lhussier, 2025), which allowed participants to situate their experiences visually and temporally. When integrated into the interview itself, rather than as a separate analytical tool, these timelines functioned, according to McGrath and Lhussier (2025), as a four-dimensional instrument that anchors shared space that minimizes power dynamics, temporally orders and clarifies events in relationship to one another, which affords opportunities to narrate one's own story, and allows participants to engage in dynamic sense making as one's story unfolds (p. 8).

The mobile life story is also spatially oriented. With his concept of emplacement, Bjarnesen advocates that we view migrants' experiences as anchored somewhere specific, in places that give meaning to movement, and which reveal these places. Such spatial grounding underlines Lenette's sanctuary conditions, which originated at the Free Store and travelled throughout the research process. The emplacement dimension of the mobile life story was not, in other words, fixed to a single building but was relational and mobile, carried forward by the bonds of trust established through sanctuary.

The stories that came from these in-depth interviews revealed the ongoing and conditional nature of the settlement process. We identified a particular temporal orientation from these interviews, what Chloe Ahmann calls subjunctive futures (2019). Although based in a different scholarly context (an ethnographic analysis of Curtis Bay residents' hopes for a new major energy project in a post-industrial landscape), Ahmann's work explores futures that are not optimistic, but instead “reflect deep ambivalence about the sorts of futures that seem credible, given the real-life limitations of the present” (2019, p. 11). These futures, in turn, can influence perceived logistical constraints and decision making (Ahmann, 2019, p. 12). For Ahmann, these subjunctive futures do not fall along a spectrum of despair to unbridled possibility, but expose ways of thinking about and taking steps toward uncertain futures. Importantly, Ahmann highlights how living in a depleted present influences what futures are possible. In her context of Curtis Bay, residents are trying to raise their lowering of socio-economic standards, while in Edmonton, we argue that recent Ukrainian migrants experiencing difficulties in resettlement due to lack of credential recognition, finding affordable housing, childcare, and language lessons creates similar depleted outlooks of the present. Mykhailo (P12) captured this ambivalence in his interview: “There was also fear about arriving and what's waiting for you in the future. If we can “grow roots” here…if our children make friends here … Would they get psychological trauma? Will I find a job? Will I be needed here?” And Laura (P11) who said, “Somewhere deep down, far away, my hope of returning to Ukraine is preventing me from finding the kind of work I would really like here in Canada, because I still hope that one day I will return to Ukraine”. Or Petra (P4) who spoke of her children's future: “I want there to be a future for my children, because in Ukraine… that war will last a long time, and I feel at peace knowing … we arrived here for a reason”. She later asked, “How do we stay so [that] the children can keep studying, so they give us that chance, open that program, so we can stay?” These comments sound like people making decisions under stress, holding possible futures open against fears of loss, responsibility, and obligation.

The timelines in our interviews made this temporal complexity visible and were narrated as they explained the significant events and later expanded upon in our follow-up in-depth questions about resettlement. Some participants commented on the methods themselves, for example, Laura (P11) said that completing the timeline caused her to “relive some emotions”, before crying as she recalled celebrating her best friend's fiftieth birthday in a basement shelter the day after the full-scale invasion began. Emotional expressions in the interviews included tears, pauses, shifts in tone, and attempts to comfort that became moments of collective feeling and revealed the weight of particular memories and the ongoing toll of displacement. They also underscored the lack of (sufficient) mental health support available in an already overwhelmed resettlement system. Susanne (P3) described how embodied and involuntary these emotional releases could be:

It happens sometimes that here in Canada … I just couldn't control my tears. You just cry, and you say to yourself, “Why are you crying? Everything's great”. And now I want to cry again. The tears just pour. You walk along, the wind blows in your face, and you have tears running down. You can't calm down.

The themes of survival, striving, and shifting challenges were consistent across the stories and data that were shared, which in turn revealed much about the importance of rebuilding community and belonging, and how these participants thought about the future.

6.4 Creative methods: photovoice and knowledge mobilization

Our in-depth interviews revealed the importance of home as a revisited theme. We understand this concept not as a fixed address, but as a relationship that under the current set of circumstances, requires renegotiation when connected to what was left behind, what was being built in Edmonton, and what was possible in the future. When Krissa-Moore suggested hosting something creative for participants, the team recognized this as an opportunity to delve deeper into this recurring concept in the community-seeded way that follows Lenette's Knowledge Holder-led inquiry (2019). The first and second author designed a photovoice workshop in which eight recent Ukrainian migrants were invited to use photos and images to build a story about home as they understood it in the past, present, and future. The group comprised seven women and one man, and six of eight had already taken part in the in-depth interviews, so their demographic profile largely mirrors that of the newcomer group described above. The seventh and eighth participants were women in their 20s. One's experience was like other recent Ukrainian newcomers, although she only spoke Russian, while the other had arrived in Canada before the full-scale invasion, completed an undergraduate degree here, and lived and worked in the city. The latter participant's trajectory might resemble the earlier-arrived community more than recent diaspora members, which reveals how the labels of “newcomer” and “diaspora” span a continuum of experience rather than a binary positioning. Photovoice is a participatory visual method in which those taking part use photography, images, or photographs to document their own experiences and generate collective dialogue (Lenette, 2019).

We met in small groups on two separate weekends and built collages on easel-sized paper. Participants crafted (built and decorated) their timeline, adding short stories (from real life or fictionalized) to each period. After participants spent time sourcing and printing off photos and decorated their collages, they described the meaning of their work, step-by-step or as an overarching journey. Past-home images ranged from highly specific (photographs of apartments, streets, and faces) to the metaphorical (images of warmth and abundance that stood for feelings rather than places). Present-home images showed participants between worlds with some including photographs of their apartments, of Krissa-Moore at the Free Store, or new activities tried in Edmonton. Others chose images that expressed the dissonance of not-quite belonging such as war imagery or one's life fitting in the palm of their hand. Finally, their pictures of the future ranged from idyllic landscapes to cozy foods to futuristic buildings, or pictures of caged birds set free. Almost every future picture was accompanied by the sentiment that whatever future home they dreamed of, the sentiment of family, safety, and realizing capability was there. We read these sentiments as being similar to those subjunctive futures described in the in-depth interviews, where members of a community were in the process of deciding whether, and how, to stay, hedging their bets and dreaming of what was possible while focusing on the necessities (safety and family).

We thought about methods to build a culture of safety during these workshops (Lenette, 2019). We provided food and drink throughout the day, purchased and shared materials, printed photographs and images, played music on a rotating playlist designated by the attendees, and compensated participants (aligning with living wage standards in Edmonton, as determined by Krissa-Moore). The second author was in attendance and translated words, phrases, or whole short stories written in Ukrainian or Russian. We also learned of the importance of art and collective creative expression as a form of settlement support. When Ramona, (the young Russian speaker) placed her chosen image before the group and shared about her childhood home in Ukraine's Luhansk region, occupied by Russia since 2014, she spoke as an expert, a Knowledge Holder, knowing what the photo meant and the cost to share it. Several participants cried throughout their own and others' stories. In Lenette's terms, this space functioned as somewhere these individuals could share without needing to prove their experience or perform gratitude (a sanctuary). A few participants identified as artists and mentioned that the workshop became a space of recognition among peers, which no formal settlement service had provided (the Free Store had employed artists to paint murals on their walls throughout the time that it was open). Several noted that these workshops provided an opportunity to meet others and build community while sharing stories.

Lenette argues that these explicit, creative, and participatory methods have a unique capacity to reach policymakers and broader audiences (2019, p. 147), which is an outcome we aspired to through our knowledge mobilization plan.

6.4.1 Photovoice photobooks

The second author compiled the collages, photos, and stories into a “photo book”, and distributed copies to all available participants. This form of return is what Lenette identifies as a methodological and ethical commitment in arts-based research with refugees (2019). This book was not a conventional academic output, but was a form of knowledge co-creation designed to return to those who generated it, in a form they could keep, share, and recognize themselves in. This book circulated within the community: it was presented at the opening events for Don'ya, a new venture by Janice Krissa-Moore, a Ukrainian restaurant that hired only recently immigrated Ukrainian women. Copies were also made available through MacEwan's URDC Office. This book served as a record of sanctuary, as evidence that the research was conducted in relationship, and that the participants were treated as authors rather than subjects. Their images of home in the past, present, and conditional future were handled with care.

6.4.2 The community timeline

The individual timelines produced during the in-depth interviews became the basis for a second, creative output – a Community Timeline – to mobilize knowledge. To construct this, the authors coded each individual timeline for discrete events and affective language, identified experiential points shared across at least eight participants (a majority of the fifteen), and grouped these into four chronological stages through team discussion (see Figure 1 below).

The first stage, living and working in Ukraine, used arrows to highlight how participants were connected to Ukraine but might be living temporarily in other European nations. A rupture occurred on February 24th, 2022, marking the beginning of the second stage, which included key adjectives participants used to describe the invasion including “fatiguing”, “scary”, “violating”, and “a horror”. The rope in this stage has a knot with frayed ends to symbolize the “complicated” and “puzzling” feelings participants mentioned while wondering what to do in the face of war. The third stage begins with the start of the CUAET program and its specific dates (March 2022 to March 2024), emphasizing its temporary nature. The explanatory text accompanying this stage highlights the role of local Edmontonians in the resettlement efforts of Ukrainian newcomers. Here, the rope image is almost broken in two (both sides are frayed but with one thread holds fast) to signal that the connection from Ukraine to Edmonton was one destination among many. The final stage is titled “the future” with “building a new life in Canada” on one side of the rope and “returning to Ukraine” on the other. The rope image then ends as it began, in a fray with arrows marking the multiple routes and decisions made by recent Ukrainian newcomers. Planes flying between stages give a sense of motion: one plane flies towards Edmonton (the CUAET stage) while the other appears to fly back in the final stage, representing those who came to Canada but later returned to Ukraine.

The text panels on the right provide a high-level overview for any viewer. The top right text panel calls out difficulties related to resettlement, and the bottom right notes that despite local efforts, Edmonton's settlement system continues to struggle due to insufficient financial and social support. It also calls attention to key barriers such as lack of gainful employment and adequate housing. The rope carried multiple meanings ranging from the interconnection of individual stories within a shared trajectory to symbolizing the possibility of continuation beyond the rupture.

The community timeline was first displayed in MacEwan University's library during Ukraine Week in October 2024, where it was available to students, staff, faculty, and members of the public who pass through as a main thoroughfare of the university. The visual format invited engagement from people who might not search out or read our findings in an academic journal. Creative knowledge dissemination is increasingly recognized as a key strategy for bridging academic and community knowledge systems and for making research findings accessible to those with the most stake in them (Lenette, 2019, p. 76). Lenette notes the importance of using thoughtful activities, such as dialogue with policymakers, rather than letting visual pieces speak for themselves, as an effective strategy to close the gap between findings and policy outcomes (2019, p. 76, 77 citing Boydell et al., 2017). For this reason, the research team sponsored a Ukrainian undergraduate student to stand with the display and engage with passersby throughout Ukraine week.

This timeline functioned as a knowledge mobilization and data collection tool. Passersby were invited to mark moments from their own or their family's migration experience on the display, extending the research's reach into MacEwan's wider community of students and staff with migration stories. Those without personal migration experiences were invited to share their perspectives on home.

During Ukraine Week, Jackie Armstong-Homeniuk, Member of the Legislative Assembly and Parliamentary Secretary for Settlement Services and Ukraine Evacuees, visited the display. The second author presented our preliminary findings and engaged her in dialogue about the relationship among settlement services, community responses, and policy decisions. This timeline was subsequently moved to the URDC Office, where the second author has since engaged other government affiliated connections, such as Roman Waschuk, former Ambassador of Canada to Ukraine and subsequently Ukraine's Business Ombudsman, and Michal Bociurkiw, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council's Eurasia Centre. It remains on display today. These encounters were small steps along a longer road of community engaged research, where the goal is to carrying findings into spaces where settlement policy is shaped, and make findings legible to members throughout the community and, for researchers to work toward accountability.

7 Discussion

7.1 On using multiple methods for applied research in a situated context

Like the other papers in this special issue, we take seriously the idea that one's methodological approach is never neutral. Santana de Andrade et al. (2026) launched this special issue by exploring how their participatory approaches with young people on the move could foster agency in ways that enable more nuanced accounts of their lives, while calling attention to the significant obstacles that shaped participation, which include uneven engagement, ethical dilemmas, and institutional constraints. We share their commitment to this kind of reflexive accounting, recognizing that participatory and creative methods are not automatically more ethical than conventional methods. As argued by Lenette (2019), and other papers in this special issue, the value of a method depends on its intentions, but more importantly, how it is put into practice.

Santana de Andrade, Morrell, and Freedman's study combined traditional qualitative participatory methods with innovative digital and creative tools, fielded across multiple countries and institutional contexts (2026). This multi-method, multi-sited context required them to reconstitute their ethical and methodological practice, which we read as opportunities to situate consent, account for power relations and representation, and to reassess safeguards anew. Santana de Andrade et al. (2026) multi-method approach offered participants varying levels and modes of engagement, and their attention to accessibility across languages, generations, and institutional positions reflected their genuine effort to address power dynamics that shape who can participate and through what means. We shared these commitments in our own work.

We combined traditional qualitative methods (participant observation, focus groups, and in-depth interviews) with participatory methods (the photovoice workshop) and creative knowledge mobilization tools (visual timelines and the community timeline installation). Like them, we also found that each method generated different kinds of knowledge. The focus groups afforded insight into community dynamics that may have been missed if we had collected such data through individual interviews. The in-depth interviews with timelines revealed the nuances of experience and texture (what anthropologists often refer to as the cultural fabric, here, the weaving of intentions for oneself and their family, at this moment and place in time) of their proposed (subjunctive) futures. The photovoice workshop integrated both relational and affective methods that helped us better understand the role of home in ways that the interviews and visual timelines did not address. Importantly, we believe multiple methods are a key approach for co-designing research and collecting data with uniquely situated and/or historically marginalized populations, like those Ukrainians displaced by war.

The most significant difference between our study and Santana de Andrade, Morrell, and Freedman was its spatial and relational context, what Lenette called sanctuary (2019). While Santana de Andrade, Morrell, and Freedman compared data collected across five countries with young people on the move, our population was defined in part by their mobility or their migration history (theirs or their ancestors). Our participants were either born in (Ukrainian-Edmontonians) or had arrived in Edmonton, but all had an affinity for Ukraine. This relative fixity, in that all participants lived in Edmonton at the time of our project, mattered because it revealed how multi-sited embeddedness influenced ordinary people's experiences and motivations while living in Edmonton, as they were simultaneously connected to elsewhere (specifically Ukraine) (Horst, 2018). Thus, the ethical concerns that potentially haunt comparative cross-national research, which include assembling and speaking about a community that does not exist outside of a researcher's design, did not apply in our context. The spatial radius of our project was small; MacEwan University and the Free Store are located within two blocks of one another. However, our community was built among individuals [which included settlement entrepreneurs who launched local initiatives to fill a need (like Krissa-Moore), staff and faculty of the URDC and MacEwan, the politicians who engaged the work, and recent Ukrainian migrants and diaspora members] who moved through these spaces and who were connected to Ukraine, if not each other. For example, MacEwan University (essentially) gifted Krissa-Moore the space to host the Free Store for a period of two years as part of their initiatives to support Ukrainian newcomers (MacEwan University, 2023). Our research spaces afforded opportunities for connection and cross-pollination of knowledge and relationship-building that were delivered in ways unavailable through most traditional research methods.

The focus of our knowledge mobilization efforts in the year following data collection was deliberately local. The authors first completed Krissa-Moore's community-facing report to help facilitate her efforts to secure additional funding to support resettlement (Long and Budianska, 2024). The first author also created a public-facing website (Long, 2024), detailing the project and its many outputs so that participants, Edmontonians, and others could connect and follow the project. The second author spoke on a panel of researchers conducting research on Ukrainians in Edmonton, during MacEwan's Ukraine Week in 2024 (this was in addition to the community timeline in the library). The first author spoke about our preliminary findings in November 2024 at the Canadian Ethnic Studies Association's conference held in Edmonton. The authors then branched out further, attending conferences in Montreal, Canada, and Helsinki, Finland, where their findings were shared with migration and settlement scholars. The choiceful roll-out was part of our ongoing practice to remain accountable to a group of individuals differently situated around the most recent migration from Ukraine. We chose to incorporate various knowledge mobilization outputs (photobooks, community timeline installation, community reports, public websites, conference papers, and finally, an open access journal article) so that our work and these findings can be visible, and so that those who took part in this work can see what is being said about them.

7.2 Looking back, in 2026

The CUAET program ended in 2024. The Free Store for Ukrainian Newcomers closed the same year, but Janice Krissa-Moore opened a catering business for Ukrainian food that only hired women from the recent migration. Don'ya's products expanded into grocery stores in the Edmonton area and her company has received extensive media coverage, including her and her daughter's pitch to Dragon's Den in 2025. Their enterprise represents what sustainable settlement support could look like when community initiative, entrepreneurial skill, and institutional goodwill align. The Ukrainian women who work at Don'ya could use this ongoing employment toward their permanent residency, should they want to apply. The second author now works full-time at MacEwan's URDC where the community timeline remains on display. This research continues as the authors are now part of group of MacEwan researchers working to secure funding for a collaborative research project, which will integrate a varied methodology including creative and participatory methods.

Having stated this, Krissa-Moore's story does not represent most Ukrainian Edmontonians, and the recent Ukrainian newcomers that work with her, do not (necessarily) represent the typical experience of resettlement in Edmonton. Not every newcomer found their footing, and not every diaspora member (quit their job and) mobilized their network or built sustaining initiatives. The improvised settlement initiatives that emerged in the gap left by formal policy were remarkable but we also saw that they were inequitable in their distribution of resources (dependent as they were on information and fragmented networks) and were ultimately insufficient for many of the people they tried to reach and who may likely have been reached by the established settlement organizations (once they received additional government funding). Lam and Yandiev (2025) recently stated that unless Ukrainian newcomers arrived with “strong English skills, savings, and relevant job experience” the CUAET program did not provide the support needed to become “self-sufficient” and left many with “no clear pathways to … stay permanently” (para. 13). To uncover the realities of the CUAET program, and its unique community response is precisely why this research matters.

8 Conclusion

The Free Store was more than a research site; it was a sanctuary according to Lenette's (2019) understanding, where conditions of trust, dignity, and linguistic freedom are fostered. We argued that the sanctuary conditions for Knowledge Holder-led inquiry, which were built through the Free Store, filtered into our research spaces and connections and thus travelled with us when conducting research off-site at MacEwan University's campus. These conditions travelled with participants to interview rooms and photovoice workshops and they were returned to the community as we mobilized knowledge and in the way we continue to engage with this community and share our collective findings. We believe the sanctuary research space can be experienced as a relational condition generated by community, which researchers' ethical practice must sustain (for the purposes of research) and for which researchers must plan to hold themselves accountable.

This paper's contribution to the literature on participatory and creative methods with migrants is to add to the body of work that focuses on creating conditions of sanctuary, to show how such practices can happen in pre-existing community spaces, in ways that build trust, re-establish safety, and reduce power asymmetries to evoke Knowledge Holder agency. This project suggests that if the conditions are already there, the researchers' task is to be worthy of them rather than to manufacture them anew. Participant observation, focus groups, in-depth interviews with visual timelines, and photovoice workshops each accessed different registers of experience, and generated different kinds of data that others could not make visible. These multiple methods helped uncover the importance of subjunctive futures and multi-sited embeddedness as concepts important to the Ukrainian Edmontonian diaspora (from first to fourth generation).

Our data show that settlement is not a destination but an ongoing, conditional process that is shaped by exhaustion, professional displacement, desires for belonging, and intergenerational questions of finding one's place in a new space. This project's mix of traditional, participatory, and creative methods gave us a way to attend to these many dimensions without requiring proof of suffering or performances of gratitude, crafted through the use of sanctuary spaces. Conventional settlement services address many practical dimensions of the process, but their support can lag if attempting to respond to an unplanned resettlement need, and due to the chronic underfunding of Canada's settlement and integration system nationwide (Lowe et al., 2017). Albertan settlement organizations require more financial support from the federal and provincial government to sufficiently address newcomers' settlement needs in Alberta. Scholars Jennifer Braun and Dominique Clément, for example, argue that Alberta in particular “exemplifies the disparities in funding levels for settlement and integration services within Canada. Not only does the federal government provide disproportionately less funding in Alberta… but the provincial government also provides less funding compared to other jurisdictions” (2023, p. 268). Instead, our work was able to provide a clearer picture as to how Edmontonians are stepping up, reaching out, and experiencing the recent resettlement of newcomers from Ukraine.

Generative AI statement

The author(s) declared that generative AI was used in the creation of this manuscript. The authors declare that generative AI (Claude for Windows, Version 1.9659.2, 390d6c) was used for light editing during the polishing stage of this manuscript, in the creation of references, and in the creation of the supplementary materials.

Any alternative text (alt text) provided alongside figures in this article has been generated by Frontiers with the support of artificial intelligence and reasonable efforts have been made to ensure accuracy, including review by the authors wherever possible. If you identify any issues, please contact us.

Publisher's note

All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article, or claim that may be made by its manufacturer, is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.

Supplementary material

The Supplementary Material for this article can be found online at: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fhumd.2026.1896742/full#supplementary-material

Supplementary material Supplementary material at the source

Supplementary material Supplementary material at the source

Footnotes

Edited by: Jane Freedman, Université Paris 8, France

Reviewed by: Natalia Doloisio, Cultures, Environnements, Arctique, Représentations, Climat (CEARC), France

Volodymyr Hnatiuk, Lviv Polytechnic National University, Ukraine

Footnotes

¹Defined as a space created through the act of arts-based and participatory research where Knowledge Holders (those with lived experiences of forced displacement) can narrate their experiences without needing to prove their experience (meeting a burden of proof) or researcher-imposed agendas (Lenette, 2019, p. 231).

²Premier Smith suggested that 57,000 Ukrainians had come to Alberta through CUAET (CPAC, 2024).

³We have included anonymized demographic tables as part of the supplementary material.

⁴Copies of all research instruments can be found at https://sites.google.com/macewan.ca/mac-uni-edmtnfreestore4ukraine/home.