An IASH Work-in-Progress seminar, delivered by Dr Anna Oechslen (Visiting Research Fellow, 2026)
Shifting imaginaries, everyday agencies: Tracing futurity in displaced Ukrainians’ accounts of remote work
In this work-in-progress seminar, I explore temporal perspectives on forced migrants’ practices of working remotely across borders. I draw on in-depth interviews with Ukrainians who worked remotely when they migrated to Germany after the beginning of Russia’s full-scale invasion of their home country in February 2022.
The participants in this study reflected on how their future plans were disrupted by the war, but also how their future imaginaries shifted during displacement. Their accounts also showed how they imagined and actively constructed futures despite uncertainty. Remote work practices played an ambiguous role in how they related to future pathways, providing continuity while also potentially cutting them off from long-term perspectives.
Against this backdrop, I look at the empirical material through a lens of futurity, understood as “an affective-temporal formation […] generative of action, aspiration, a drive to change things, and of emotions like passion, dread, longing, fear, or anxiety” (Mankekar & Gupta, 2025, p. 15). Using this as a starting point, I aim to move beyond passive and linear understandings of refugees’ future orientations and better understand the ways in which digital work arrangements contribute to shaping them.
Mankekar, P., & Gupta, A. (2025). The Future of Futurity. Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.1215/9781478060604
Meeting ID: 384 971 962 716 1
Passcode: nV6Rg79e