Back to ‘normal’? Whiteness and life-making among Ukrainian migrants three years on
Back to ‘normal’? Whiteness and life-making among Ukrainian migrants three years on
Mon Sep 22 15:52:07 CEST 2025
Morning Brew Talk by Daria Krivonos on Tuesday 14.10.2025
The Department of Mobility and Migration at the Institute of Ethnology CAS invites you to the upcoming Morning Brew Talk “Back to ‘normal’? Whiteness and life-making among Ukrainian migrants three years on” by Daria Krivonos, sociologist and Finnish Academy Research Fellow at the Swedish School of Social Science, University of Helsinki.
The lecture will take place on Tuesday 14.10.2025, 9:00–11:00 (CET) in the conference room (5th floor) of the Institute of Ethnology CAS, Na Florenci 3, Prague 1. To attend online via MS Teams, please use this link.
Abstract:
Some of the early scholarly analyses of Ukrainian displacement after 2022 framed Ukrainian refugees as ‘white’ and ‘deserving’ in contrast to non-European asylum seekers. While racist expulsions across EU borders indeed remained normalized, the narratives on Ukrainians often relied on ahistorical, emergency-driven, and event-based perspectives on forced displacement. Now, as the war entered its fourth year, ‘host societies’ are fatigued by the war and are back to ‘normal’. This presentation centers the perspectives of Ukrainian nationals who have lived in Warsaw both before and after 2022, to explore what this ‘normal’ entails once the sense of imminent crisis has faded. It concludes that, as local and international communities grow weary, the structures that once supported Ukrainian refugees have rapidly deteriorated, revealing the limits of whiteness. This erosion must be understood within the broader coloniality of the EU migration-asylum regime — one never designed to sustain the lives of life-seekers, even those portrayed as “relatively civilised, relatively European.”
Some of the early scholarly analyses of Ukrainian displacement after 2022 framed Ukrainian refugees as ‘white’ and ‘deserving’ in contrast to non-European asylum seekers. While racist expulsions across EU borders indeed remained normalized, the narratives on Ukrainians often relied on ahistorical, emergency-driven, and event-based perspectives on forced displacement. Now, as the war entered its fourth year, ‘host societies’ are fatigued by the war and are back to ‘normal’. This presentation centers the perspectives of Ukrainian nationals who have lived in Warsaw both before and after 2022, to explore what this ‘normal’ entails once the sense of imminent crisis has faded. It concludes that, as local and international communities grow weary, the structures that once supported Ukrainian refugees have rapidly deteriorated, revealing the limits of whiteness. This erosion must be understood within the broader coloniality of the EU migration-asylum regime — one never designed to sustain the lives of life-seekers, even those portrayed as “relatively civilised, relatively European.”
Bio:
Daria Krivonos is a sociologist and a Finnish Academy Research Fellow based at the Swedish School of Social Science, University of Helsinki. Her research explores migration at the intersection of racialisation, labour, class, and gender. Her book “Race and Labour among Russian Migrants: Reclaiming Whiteness in Europe” is forthcoming with Bristol University Press in 2026.
Daria Krivonos is a sociologist and a Finnish Academy Research Fellow based at the Swedish School of Social Science, University of Helsinki. Her research explores migration at the intersection of racialisation, labour, class, and gender. Her book “Race and Labour among Russian Migrants: Reclaiming Whiteness in Europe” is forthcoming with Bristol University Press in 2026.
This lecture is part of the project “Unequal citizenship and transnational mobilisation of Polish, Czech, and Ukrainian Roma in the face of war in Ukraine” supported by the Czech Science Foundation, registration no. 24-14388L. For more information, visit https://rocit.pl.
The poster in PDF format is available for download HERE.
