Speakers and presentations
Jessica Schultz, Senior Researcher Law, Chr. Michelsen Institute.
Title: The regulation of migrant inclusion through attachment criteria: a legal perspective on the 'temporary turn' in Europe
Abstract: tba
Oksana Shmulyar Gréen, Associate Professor, Department of Sociology and Work Science, University of Gothenburg.
Title: Living in (Legal) Temporariness: What Ukrainian Displacement in Europe Can Teach Policymakers?
Abstract: Amid the arrival of millions of Ukrainians across the European Union, temporariness has become firmly established as a legal, institutional, and administrative condition shaping the lives of displaced populations and other newly arrived migrants. Following the activation of the EU’s Temporary Protection Directive (TPD) in 2022, scholarly and public debates have often reinforced a narrative of Ukrainians as a comparatively privileged group of migrants. To develop a more nuanced understanding of how temporality has from structured the lives of displaced Ukrainians, I draw on the concept of temporal dissonance, which sheds light on the complex layers of uncertainty and often conflicting tempos embedded within three interrelated forms of temporality.
Drawing on examples from my current and ongoing research in Sweden, I first examine legal temporalities, demonstrating how the temporary and evolving legal framework of the TPD creates legal cracks and uncertainties for displaced Ukrainians, constraining their pace of integration into Swedish society and their capacity to make longer-term plans. Second, through the lens of institutional temporalities, I illustrate how displaced Ukrainians are incorporated into the broader temporalities and requirements of the Swedish integration system, where egalitarian institutional norms and standardized trajectories repeatedly come into tension with individuals’ professional qualifications, aspirations, and desired pace of integration. Finally, I turn to the lived temporalities of displacement to examine how prolonged uncertainty shapes displaced Ukrainians’ capacity to imagine the future—and, indeed, to sustain hope. Their near future remains punctuated by temporary legal statuses, institutional transitions, and the continuing war, while the more distant future is difficult to envision and often contingent on the trajectories and decisions of family members located across Sweden and Ukraine. Taken together, these intersecting temporalities reveal that the apparent legal privilege associated with temporary protection can coexist with profound temporal uncertainty, limiting displaced Ukrainians’ ability to establish continuity, exercise agency, and construct viable futures.
