Panel Forced Migrants from Ukraine: Negotiations of “Here and There”

The Call

The recent escalation of the war in Ukraine has put forced migration into the centre of political debates in Europe. Several European countries have witnessed en masse arrivals of people seeking protection from Ukraine. Whether these were relatively new (i.e. Poland) or more established reception (i.e. Germany) countries, these movements have led to heated discussions about European border and asylum regimes. Yet with displacement dragging on longer, crucial questions about the contestations of not only “physical” borders but also of societal borders/boundaries have become burning. Starting with registration in respective European countries, forced migrants from Ukraine are daily confronted with a wide range of bureaucratic agents from employment agencies and welfare agencies to school administrators. It is in these encounters that practices of inclusion and exclusion redraw and reproduce societal boundaries. This panel is going to address the following questions: 
How do displaced migrants from Ukraine perceive and negotiate this production of boundaries?  
How do they perceive and negotiate being “here and there”, combining victimhood and agency?  
Looking at choices and practices in different spaces and arenas, such as mobility and education, this panel takes stock of the ways in which displaced people from Ukraine cope with borders, boundaries, and their position in and between Ukraine, their host country, and a potential third destination.

We welcome contributions from various social science perspectives.

Panel Conveners

Zeynep Yanaşmayan is the head of Migration Department at the German Centre for Integration and Migration Research (DeZIM). She is an interdisciplinary scholar working at the intersection of political science, sociology, and socio-legal studies with research interests on citizenship, migration and mobility studies, governance of religious diversity, transnationalism and diaspora politics. At DeZIM, together with her team, she concentrates on migration governance at the European level, cooperation with transit and origin countries as well as individual mobility aspirations. She is the author of The Migration of Highly Educated Turkish Citizens to Europe: From Guestworker to Global Talent (Routledge) and co-editor of The Failure of Popular Constitution-Making in Turkey: Regressing to Autocracy (Cambridge UP). Her work has previously been published in Ethnic and Racial Studies, Citizenship Studies, Political Geography and Law and Social Inquiry. She holds a PhD in Social Sciences from KU Leuven, Belgium.

Irina Mützelburg is a political scientist and postdoctoral researcher at ZOiS, at the German-French (ANR-DFG) project LimSpaces. Her research interests include education, migration and asylum policies in the EU and its neighbourhood, norm and policy transfer, and interdependencies between state and non-state, international and national actors. Currently, she studies the educational situation of Ukrainian pupils displaced to Germany, including education policies and families’ choices. Before coming to ZOiS, she worked as a lecturer and research assistant in political sociology at Sciences Po Lyon (2019-2021) and at the Master of European Studies at the European University Viadrina in Frankfurt/Oder (2018-2019). Until 2019, she did her PhD at Sciences Po Paris on the transfer of international asylum norms to Ukraine. The book will be published in 2022 with Palgrave Macmillan.