When the classroom disappears: reconceptualising pedagogical identity in Ukrainian higher education under conditions of wartime crisis

The full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 imposed an unprecedented rupture upon the country’s higher education system, compelling lecturers to sustain pedagogical practice under conditions of chronic displacement, infrastructural collapse and existential threat. This conceptual paper argues that such conditions do not merely disrupt pedagogical routines but fundamentally destabilise the identity structures through which university teachers understand themselves as professionals. Drawing on established frameworks of teacher professional identity, the theoretical literature on agency in emergency online education, and a growing body of scholarship on higher education in fragile and conflict-affected contexts, the paper proposes an original conceptual framework – the Triadic Identity Disruption Model – that maps three intersecting dimensions of identity instability experienced by Ukrainian higher education teachers: ontological dislocation, role fragmentation, and community severance. The paper further argues that action research, reconceived as a practice of what we term pedagogical survivance, offers a theoretically grounded and practically accessible pathway through which teachers may re-narrate, reconstitute and ultimately reclaim their professional identities. Implications for institutional policy, teacher support programmes and the international scholarship of teacher identity in crisis contexts are discussed.