Participants' Biographical Notes
Keynote I: Just Like Us? Ukrainian Refugee Migration and the Hierarchies of Race and Belonging
Jannis Panagiotidis (Research Center for the History of Transformations, University of Vienna, Austria)
is a historian and migration scholar and the Scientific Director of the Research Center for the History of Transformations (RECET) at the University of Vienna. Before joining RECET, he was a Junior Professor of Migration and Integration of Germans from Russia at the Osnabrück University Institute for Migration Research and Intercultural Studies (IMIS). His research mainly deals with post-1945 migration history, specifically co-ethnic diaspora migration, post-Soviet migration, and the global migrations of German minorities from Eastern Europe. In his current work, he focuses on the history and present of anti-East European racism. His publications include the monographs The Unchosen Ones: Diaspora, Nation, and Migration in Israel and Germany (Indiana University Press, 2019), Postsowjetische Migration in Deutschland: eine Einführung (Beltz Juventa Verlag, 2021), and Antiosteuropäischer Rassismus in Deutschland: Geschichte und Gegenwart (Beltz Juventa Verlag, 2024, co-authored with Hans-Christian Petersen).
Panel I: The Diversity of Ukrainian Migration
From Students to Refugees: Navigating Identity and (Im)mobility in the Wake of the Russian Invasion of Ukraine
Ezenwa Olumba (Conflict, Violence, and Terrorism Research Centre, University of London, UK)
is a Doctoral Research Fellow at the Conflict, Violence, and Terrorism Research Centre at Royal Holloway, University of London. His research agenda lies at the intersection of migration, psychology, and politics, focusing on how violence and cultural contexts influence individual and group behaviours. His research articles have appeared in Culture & Psychology, Third World Quarterly, Small Wars & Insurgencies, and Terrorism and Political Violence, African Security Review, and Genealogy. His seminal work on cognitive immobility, a term he coined in a paper published by Culture & Psychology, highlights how people can become cognitively entrapped in a place or experience from their past, leading to significant challenges in their current lives. This work has garnered considerable attention, featuring in numerous op-eds and blogs, and has been translated into multiple languages.
Perspectives on Mother- and Refugeehood: Ukrainian Forced Migrants in Berlin and Frankfurt Oder
Jonna Rock (German Centre for Integration and Migration Research, DeZIM, Berlin, Germany)
conducts research that is interdisciplinary, combining approaches from sociology and ethnography with elements of oral history and political and social history. She is the author of Intergenerational Memory and Language of the Sarajevo Sephardim (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019) and of several journal articles, book chapters, and working papers, including in Judaica Petropolitana (The Hebrew University), Nationalities Papers (Routledge), and Osteuropa (DGO). Rock holds a PhD in Slavonic Area Studies from Humboldt University of Berlin. Following her doctoral research, she has worked on post-Soviet migration to Germany. At DeZIM, Rock focuses on Ukrainian refugees’ migration decisions and experiences.
“Тhere's no such a bad rush. Everything has its time”: Perspectives of Displaced Mothers from Ukraine in Germany
Elen Fübbeker (Philosophy of Education and Social Pedagogy, Rostock, Germany)
M. A., was born in 1992 in southern Ukraine and grew up in Frankfurt (Oder) after 2001. After studying philosophy and educational sciences at the University of Rostock, she is now a research assistant at the Institute for Philosophy of Education and Social Pedagogy at the University of Rostock. Her main areas of work and research include social work, especially child and youth welfare, critical social work, biographical research and post-migrant family research, mental health and trauma pedagogy.
Panel II: Inclusion, Return, and Questions of Language
Navigating New Realities of Social Inclusion in Times of Crises through (Ukrainian) Forced Migration: Local-level Governance Challenges and Adaptations for Urban Resilience
Nora Ratzmann & Denis Zeković (German Centre for Integration and Migration Research, DeZIM, Berlin, Germany)
Nora Ratzmann is Research Project Leader at DeZIM Institute, Berlin (German Centre for Integration and Migration Research), focusing on migration governance, social protection, social rights, discrimination and EU freedom of movement. She currently leads several qualitative research projects on Ukrainian forced migrants' integration in Germany. After studying social sciences (with a focus on European studies, social development, and international relations) at the universities of Osnabrück, Montréal, Oxford, and the London School of Economics, Nora worked on migration and social policy issues at the policy research institute RAND Europe, the UNESCO-affiliated International Institute for Educational Planning (IIEP) and the German development cooperation GIZ. From 2015 to 2019, her doctoral research at the LSE's International Institute for Inequality and Department of Social Policy investigated barriers to accessing German basic social security for EU citizens from the perspectives of internal migration control and institutional discrimination.
Denis Zeković is an interdisciplinary social scientist, and currently works as Research Fellow at DeZIM, the German Centre for Integration and Migration Research, on a project on urban resilience in the context of forced migration. In his work, he primarily focuses on local migration governance, especially migrant integration and migrants’ settlement pathways after arrival. Previously, he conducted research on the implications of regional development on social space. Denis is interested in topics such as borders, conflict, and migration, and has experience in social network analysis, computational methods, and participatory methods. He studied sociology, political science and Islamic studies at the University of Tübingen, and completed the Research Master in International Development Studies at the University of Amsterdam (UvA).
Going Back Home in War: Ukrainian Refugees and Returnees
Neonila Glukhodid (Political Science, Northwestern University, USA)
is currently pursuing a PhD in Political Science at Northwestern University. Her research focuses on public opinion in wartime, legacies of violence, and electoral impact of armed non-state actors with geographical focus on Ukraine and post-Soviet states. Neonila earned her MA in Political Science from Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU). She obtained undergraduate degrees from FAU and the National University “Ostroh Academy” in Ukraine in political science, theater and media studies, and English and German language and literature. During her time at FAU, Neonila also studied at Duke University, Durham, USA.
Ukrainian-Russian Bilingualism in the War-Affected Migrant and Refugee Communities in Germany and Austria: Language Attitudes and Vitality
Vladislava Warditz (Slavic Studies, Cologne, Germany)
is a slavist and linguist, associate professor (Privatdozent) of the Department of Slavonic Studies at the University of Cologne (Germany). She studied Slavonic Philology and obtained her doctorate degree at Lomonosov Moscow State University (MGU). She was a junior professor at the University of Mainz, visiting professor at the Department of Translation Studies at Graz University (Austria) and a visiting professor at the Department of Slavonic Studies at the University of Bonn (Germany), the Department of Slavonic Studies at the Technical University of Dresden, and at the Departments of Slavonic Studies at the Universities of Jena and Cologne. In 2020-2021 she was the principal investigator of a German-Belgian research project “Migration, Slavistics, and Circulation of Knowledge: A Case of Max Vasmer” (University of Potsdam/ Catholic University of Leuven, Gerda-Henkel-Stiftung). In 2022, she was co-leader of the German-Israeli research project "Multilingual families’ response to COVID-19: New Opportunities and Challenges", supported by the German-Israeli Foundation for Scientific Research and Development (GIF).
Keynote II: May God Have a Photograph of This: Narratives of the War in Ukraine and Ukrainian Refugees in US and German Fiction 2014-2024
Miriam Finkelstein (South Slavic Literary and Cultural Studies, University of Konstanz, Germany)
is Professor of Slavic Literatures at the University of Konstanz, Germany. She specializes in Russophone poetry and prose as well as in comparative approaches to Slavic literatures. Her main research areas include contemporary translingual and multilingual literatures, literature about migration and Russian-Jewish practices of memory and commemoration. Currently, she is completing her second book about memory and history narratives in recent Russian-American and Russian-German fiction. Her latest publications are: "mama sagte". Mütter-Sprachen in der russophonen Gegenwartsdichtung, in Vielsprachigkeit in slavischen Literaturen. Anja Burghardt, Eva Hausbacher (Eds.), Narr Verlag 2024 (forthcoming); Soviet Colonialism Reloaded. Encounters between Russians and Central Europeans in Contemporary World Literature, in East Central Europe Between the Colonial and the Postcolonial in the Twentieth Century. Dorota Kołodziejczyk, Siegfried Huigen (Eds.) Palgrave Macmillan. https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-031-17487-2_10 (Open Access); and From German into Russian and Back. Russian-German Translingual Literature, in: Routledge Handbook of Translingual Literature. Eds. Steven Kellmann, Natasha Lvovich. London: Routledge, 2022, 188-199.
Keynote III: Ukrainian Refugees in the United States: Permanent Settlement Through Temporary Protected Status
Halyna Lemekh (Sociology and Criminal Justice, St. Francis College, USA)
is Associate Professor of Sociology and the Director of the Forum on Migration (FOM) at St. Francis College. She earned an MA in philology in Ukraine in 1995 and a Ph.D. in Sociology from The New School University in 2007. Her research focuses on the social construction of the identities of newly arrived immigrants in New York City, the impact of immigration on children, and the relationships between different groups and waves of immigrants. Her book Ukrainian Immigrants in New York: Collision of Two Worlds focuses on the politics of identity and the collision of diverse identities of newly arrived immigrants in their adaptation to US society. Her peer-reviewed articles on newly arrived Korean and Central American immigrants appeared in the Journal of Contemporary Ethnography (JCE), the Journal of International Migration and Integration (JIMI), and the Journal of Borderlands Studies (JBS). She currently conducts research on Ecuadoran immigrants and Ukrainian refugees.
Panel III: Comparative Perspectives on Ukrainian Refugee Integration
Working Abroad During and After the War at Home: Comparative Perspectives on the Right to Work for Ukrainians in the United States and Germany
Janine Prantl (Institute of European Law, University of Fribourg, Switzerland)
is a Senior Researcher and Lecturer at the Institute of European Law at the University of Fribourg (Switzerland). Prior to this position, she worked as Immigration Postdoctoral Associate at Cornell Law School and as Legal Fellow for the Global Strategic Litigation Council for Refugee Rights. She received her doctoral degree from the University of Innsbruck (Austria), where she previously worked as Research and Teaching Fellow at the Department of European and Public International Law, focusing on international and European human rights and refugee rights. Her doctoral project dealt with the legal framework for refugee resettlement to the European Union. Janine also holds an LLM degree from Columbia University, with honors as James Kent Scholar. Her research focuses on contemporary migration law and policy issues, with particular attention to humanitarian admission. Her publications appeared in leading journals such as the Georgetown Immigration Law Journal, the California Law Review, the European Papers, and the Austrian Law Journal. She has commented on Articles of the Refugee Convention and the TFEU. Her monograph The legal framework for refugee resettlement to the European Union with lessons from the American model was published by Nomos in June 2023.
“They let us in but don’t know what to do with us”: Mobility, Temporary Legal Status, and the Integration of Ukrainian Refugees in the United States
Claudia Sadowski-Smith (English, Arizona State University, USA)
is Professor of English and American Studies at Arizona State University. She is the author of The New Immigrant Whiteness: Neoliberalism, Race, and Post-Soviet Migration to the United States (New York University Press, 2018) and Border Fictions: Globalization, Empire, and Writing at the Boundaries of the United States (University of Virginia Press, 2008). She is also the editor of Globalization on the Line: Culture, Capital, and Citizenship at U.S. Borders (Palgrave, 2002) and of three special issues on the cultures of global post/socialism, comparative border studies, and postsocialist literatures in the United States, respectively. In addition, Sadowski-Smith has published on climate migration, comparative US migration, transnational adoption, and transnational reality TV in such journals as American Quarterly, American Studies, South Atlantic Quarterly, European Journal of Cultural Studies, and Diaspora
Closing Remarks
Iuliia Lashchuk (European University Institute, Florence, Italy)
is a Max Weber Fellow at the Migration Policy Centre (RSCAS, European University Institute). Iuliia received her PhD (Summa Cum Laude) in philosophy from the University of Warsaw. She is focusing her research on the categories of otherness and strangeness, specifically on gender issues and female migration. Her current research analyses the reception and integration of Ukrainian female refugees at three levels: policies, civil society, and diaspora. She is a member of the Research Network on Ukrainian Migration.