Between Agency and Betrayal: Ukrainian Women Refugees and the Double Bind of Deservingnes

UW Center for Russia, East Europe and Central Asia (CREECA) lecture series, Room 206. Coffee/tea and cookies at 3:45 pm.

media release: About the Lecture: How do refugees position themselves within discourses of deservingness, a category whose salience has intensified in migration-sensitive political contexts? Drawing on 40 in-depth Zoom interviews with Ukrainian female refugees in Germany, Popovych finds that refugees’ self-assessed deservingness is shaped by two intersecting dimensions: their perceived moral standing in the host society and within their national community.

About the speaker: Anna Popovych, a Ph.D. candidate in sociology at UW-Madison, is originally from the Kyiv region of Ukraine. She holds a master’s degree in global economy from Kyiv National Economic University (2006) and a master’s degree in global labor from Penn State University (2019). Her dissertation focuses on how ongoing war disrupts and reshapes the system of meanings guiding social action. Her research includes the impact of wartime conditions on reproductive discourse in Ukraine, political attitudes of internally displaced persons from Donbas, and civic-political identities among Ukrainian disabled war veterans.