“Elite Refugees?”: Identity and Practices of Professional Self-Mobilization among Ukrainian Academic Migrants
“Elite Refugees?”: Identity and Practices of Professional Self-Mobilization among Ukrainian Academic Migrants

Summary/Abstract: The Russian invasion of Ukraine has brought on another wave of war-related migration to Central and Western Europe. This wave includes a large number of Ukrainian academics. They are receiving unprecedented assistance from the European academic community, allowing them to continue schol- arly work, gain experience working in European institutions, establish academic connections, share research practices, and generally participate in the intellectual pursuit in the host countries. Being on the receiving end of institutional and grass-roots aid also aff ects the self-perception of the Ukrainian academics who have become forced migrants. Their awareness of their “special” position contributes to the evolution of their ideas about their social and professional duties. The aim of this article is to analyze manifestations of agency among Ukrainian academic migrants in the forms of self-identifi cation and specifi c practices of social and academic self-mobilization. In the authors’ view, considering the agency of Ukrainian academics will help initiate a discussion about the long-term consequences of assistance to displaced scholars for the academic systems of both the host countries and Ukraine. The study is based on the corpus of oral-historical interviews collected as part of the project “Moving West: Ukrainian Ac- ademics in Conditions of Forced Migration (2014-2022).” A distinguishing feature of the project is that interviews were conducted wi

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