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. In Germany, interviewees navigate the distinction between “deserving” forced migrants and “undeserving” economic migrants. On the one hand, they distance themselves from the stigmatized label of “refugee.” On the other, their privileged Temporary Protection status—granting mobility and labor market access—complicates this positioning, as some fear being perceived as opportunists rather than vulnerable subjects. Simultaneously, refugees confront expectations rooted in a wartime ethos of care and contribution, which frames leaving the country as potentially unpatriotic. Women reported feeling guilty or judged by compatriots as lacking commitment or even as “traitors,” particularly when their departure was motivated by long-term security rather than immediate physical danger. These tensions create a moral double bind in which women must negotiate contradictory projections of worth and belonging. Popovych identifies strategies they employ to reassert self-worth, ranging from emphasizing contributions to both host and home societies to reframe mobility as an extension of care. By situating refugees’ self-worth at the intersection of these two evaluative frameworks I contribute to sociological understandings of refugee agency and the overlooked nexus of war-induced migration and national identity.
About the Speaker: Anna Popovych, a Ph.D. candidate in Sociology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, is originally from the Kyiv region of Ukraine. She holds a Master’s in Global Economy from Kyiv National Economic University (2006) and a Master’s 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.