The ordinariness of life-making in displacement: Young Ukrainian workers’ care and work in Warsaw after 2022

Abstract

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork among young Ukrainian nationals in Warsaw from 2020 to 2023, the article examines how the labour of social reproduction is placed on Ukrainian migrant workers, who are confronted with the responsibility of ensuring care for their families and communities in the context of forced displacement. The analysis puts the concept of ‘crisis ordinariness’ in dialogue with social reproduction feminism to offer the ‘ordinariness of life-making’ as a prism to examine the mundane and invisibilised labour of social reproduction performed by migrant communities alongside their ‘productive’ work lives in precarious labour markets. It is argued that forced displacement is not only a shock event and a disruption of the normal but a day-to-day problem of social reproduction, defined as the ability of individuals to maintain their lives daily. By focusing on ordinariness as opposed to emergency, the analysis demonstrates that it is the already-precarious migrant workers who bear the burden of ameliorating protracted ‘crisis’ through their reproductive labour. In particular, the article engages with the overlooked role of young people who care for their peers, co-nationals, siblings, parents and grandparents locally and transnationally.

Introduction: ‘Everything here was built by Ukrainian workers’

As we were passing brightly lit skyscrapers in the centre of Warsaw late in the evening in early February 2020, my interlocutor Volodia ¹ said: ‘You see this? Everything here was built by Ukrainian workers.’ Volodia had moved to Warsaw from Ukraine as a student and soon joined a food delivery company. A couple of days later, I met Karina in a trendy, newly developed district of Warsaw. She worked as a doctor for a private company. As we were walking around her district, she was pointing to different businesses: ‘You see that sushi place? Ukrainians work there. That new bakery is also run by Ukrainians. That spa place? Ukrainian women work there.’

When I returned to Warsaw in May 2022, the posters in metro stations, which once advertised jobs for Ukrainian migrant workers, had been partially replaced with messages reading ‘We stand with Ukraine’. This shift, along with Volodia’s and Karina’s comments, serves as a reminder that before the Russian 2022 invasion, Ukrainian nationals were the top recipients of employment-related residence permits in the EU, while Poland became the leading destination for labour migration within the union (Eurostat, 2022). In the aftermath of 2022, the movement of Ukrainian refugees mirrored previously established labour migration routes (Drążkiewicz et al., 2023), with Poland hosting over 1.5 million people registered for Temporary Protection, the highest number in the EU (UNHCR, 2023).

Departing from Volodia and Karina’s observations, the article shifts the gaze from the temporal urgency of the present and the narratives of ‘crisis’ towards the continuities between labour migration and the social reproduction performed by members of these communities. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Warsaw (2020–2023), it observes that Ukrainian migrant workers provided essential support to forcefully displaced people in the context of the full-scale war. It argues that displacement is not only a shock event and a disruption of the normal but also a day-to-day problem of social reproduction, defined as the ability of people to maintain their lives daily (see also Illner, 2021). The analysis puts Berlant’s (2011) concept of ‘crisis ordinariness’ in dialogue with social reproduction feminism to offer the ordinariness of life-making as a prism to examine the mundane and invisibilised labour of social reproduction performed by migrant communities. By focusing on the ordinariness, the article turns to quieter, protracted and invisibilised life-making labour performed by individuals and collectives that have been long on the receiving end of depletion (Rai, 2024).

While social reproduction literature has examined migrant care workers (e.g. Hochschild, 2000; Parrenas, 2001), the role of transnational households in the reproduction of lives in ‘destination’ countries (Elliot, 2016), and more recently, the conditions of migrant front-line workers during the Covid-19 pandemic (e.g. Mezzadri, 2022), the links between migration, displacement and reproductive politics remain under-explored (see however Kilkey et al., 2024; Maury, 2025; Santamarina, 2024; Schling, 2017). These links become pertinent in the context of restrictive asylum policies, austerity, individualisation of survival and the rollback of welfare, when questions of livelihood are increasingly addressed through notions of self-reliance, entrepreneurialism and ‘resilience’ (Pascucci, 2019). From a theoretical standpoint, the article refocuses the narratives of work, social reproduction and capitalist development not only facing men and women in the private sphere of a (white Western) household, the binaries of ‘caring mommies and working daddies’ (Bhattarcharyya, 2018, p. 51), but also ‘workers racialised in different ways, waged and unwaged, migrants and citizens’ (Mohandesi & Teitelman, 2017). To this end, the article engages with the overlooked role of young migrant workers who care for their peers, co-nationals, siblings, parents and grandparents in the context of forced displacement.

In what follows, the article outlines the theoretical approach of the ‘ordinariness of life-making’. It then contextualises migration from Ukraine in the context of post-Soviet capitalist development, which turned labour migration into a displaced model of social reproduction (Apostolova, 2021). In the empirical section, I first focus on the story of Andrii, a young Ukrainian man working in the night service economy while hosting his displaced family members in a small studio apartment in Warsaw. While Andrii’s narrative sheds light on one story, it is illustrative of the longer-term links between productive and reproductive labour performed by migrant workers in the crisis ordinariness. The second empirical section examines how this ordinariness is further constituted through the simultaneous process of naturalisation, devaluation and misrecognition of young Ukrainian people’s skills and time necessary for the remaking of life. In my conclusions, I reflect on what a ‘migrant worker’ perspective can tell us about the implicit assumptions built into social reproduction theory (see Schling, 2017).

The ordinariness of life-making in displacement

What could have become a humanitarian catastrophe was prevented by thousands of volunteers from Poland, Ukraine and elsewhere who came to the border to assist the Ukrainian refugees in the first months of the full-scale invasion (Fomina & Pachocka, 2024). Cullen Dunn and Kaliszewska (2023, p. 20) write about the first months of the 2022 invasion and what they call ‘distributed humanitarianism’ as a means of understanding ‘the nature of solidarity and giving in the digital age’. Their ethnography shows that where well-funded international aid organisations failed utterly – a situation that is not unique to Ukraine – flexible, well-functional, ‘just in time’ highly transitory aid chains were rapidly created by individual volunteers who effectively managed the crisis on their own. Yet, as the authors note, highly flexible and scalable distributed humanitarianism falls short when faced with racialised constructions of the other and longer-term commitments, and when volunteers become exhausted and lose a sense of fellow feeling. In 2023, the European Commission warned of the ‘solidarity fatigue’ due to the cost-of-living crisis in the EU (Asscher, 2023), with other evidence showing the slipping public support for admitting Ukrainian refugees into Poland (Golebiowska et al., 2024), the decline in funding from international humanitarian organisations (ReliefWeb, 2024) and ordinary people’s waning engagement in volunteer work (Fomina & Pachocka, 2024, p. 55).

What happens when the fragile social relations sustaining an immediate solidarity response crumble and when international and local communities become fatigued by the war and solidarity efforts? I turn to the mundane processes of life-making among communities in displacement, the temporality of which is far from extraordinary. Berlant’s (2011) notion of ‘crisis ordinariness’ helps understand the mundane and invisibilised practices of life-making that unfold beyond temporalities of urgency. ‘Crisis ordinariness’ refers to the way in which crisis is not an extraordinary or isolated event but rather an ongoing, pervasive condition woven into the fabric of everyday life. It challenges the notion of crises as sudden disruptions, framing them instead as a normalised part of daily existence, particularly for those living under structural inequalities or precarious conditions (Berlant, 2011). Theorising ‘crisis ordinariness’ within the context of the reception of Ukrainian refugees does not negate the catastrophic consequences of Russia’s invasion, which forced millions of people to flee their homes. Instead, crisis ordinariness makes it possible to shift the focus away from temporary humanitarian emergency responses to the longer-term and routinised practices of localised migrant communities that extend beyond the state of emergency. The focus on the hyper-visibilised, exceptional and spectacularised forms of violence overlooks protracted and invisibilised activities and practices that take place ‘in ordinary worlds shaped in a crisis-defined and continuing now’ long marked by a sense of loss (Berlant, 2011, p. 54). To many collectives, the present is already structured through ‘crisis ordinariness’, a ‘business as usual’, which reframes the exceptionalist logic of trauma (Benson & Lewis, 2019; Berlant, 2011; Emejulu & Bassel, 2020).

Emejulu and Bassel (2020) argue along similar lines in relation to research on ‘precarisation’, reminding us that what is often framed as a ‘new’ crisis in relation to austerity is in fact a prolongation of minoritised women’s ordinary and routinised experience of inequality. What they call the ‘banality of everyday inequalities’ experienced by minoritised populations only becomes accentuated and reinforced by the dismantling of the welfare state, but little is actually new in the economic and social disparities. In fact, the persistently high unemployment and poverty rates of such communities are a reminder of the fact that ‘capitalism, patriarchy and white supremacy are operating as intended’ (Bassel & Emejulu, 2017, p. 40).

I position and extend the above discussion on the ordinariness of crisis in dialogue with social reproduction feminism literature (e.g. Apostolova, 2024; Bhattarcharya, 2017; Katz, 2001; Lyubchenko, 2022) to propose that the ordinariness of life-making is a productive lens for recentring the disavowed activities of caregiving performed by migrant and racialised communities, which are foundational to collective survival on the margins of racial capitalism (Goffe, 2023). Here, life-making labour refers to the labour that goes into maintaining and reproducing human beings under capitalism, encompassing the diverse practices involved in creating ‘the conditions of living’ (Apostolova, 2021; Federici, 2019; Katz, 2001). Marxist feminists and socialist-feminist scholars have demonstrated that the disavowed and unrecognised forms of work structured by gendered, classed and racialised relations are absolutely necessary to the existence of the sphere of ‘production’ in the first place, with the burden of survival and remaking life outsourced to some of the most vulnerable groups of people (Bhattarcharyya, 2018; Dutchak, 2023).

Recently, scholars have shown renewed interest in social reproduction in the context of the neoliberal assault, the rollback of the welfare state, austerity regimes and growing social inequalities, which were put in sharp relief by the Covid-10 pandemic (Mezzadri et al., 2022). Productive labour came to a halt, and the social reproduction labour performed by racialised and working-class populations in hospitals, care facilities and households moved to the forefront of public and academic attention (Illner, 2021). But rather than being an exogenous shock driven by the pandemic, the ‘Covid-19 crisis’ was a result of the long-term attack on the forces of social reproduction, from the erosion of healthcare budgets to the processes of labour informalisation (Mezzadri et al., 2022; Ossome, 2020). Critical accounts further revisit Black-feminist, postcolonial and migrant diasporic writing on social reproduction, thus expanding our understanding of the present-day care practices that persist on the margins of racial capitalism (e.g. Apostolova, 2021; Goffe, 2023; Lyubchenko, 2022; Mullings, 2021; Santamarina, 2024; Valiavicharska, 2020). Recent empirical literature examines how dispossessed communities ‘make life’ in the shadows of ‘premature death’ (Gilmore, 2007), making reproductive politics into a matter of survival amidst the uneven geographies of racial capitalism (Goffe, 2023; Santamarina, 2024). People in the most precarious conditions sustain themselves outside the formal categories of paid labour (Mullings, 2021), leading to the rise of migrant led collective action for poverty alleviation (Piacentini, 2015). In this context, the mutual care practices performed by minoritised racialised populations not only allow for collective survival but also enable people’s capacity to struggle and form political subjectivities within contexts of racialised, gendered and classed exclusions (Tironi & Rodríguez-Giralt, 2017). Revisiting histories of capitalism that trace the links between racialisation and dispossession makes visible how socially reproductive work has been foundational to the agency of unfree, racialised and disposable workers (Mullings, 2021; Santamarina, 2024; Williams, 1944).

I argue that in the context of Russia’s attack on Ukraine, the ordinariness of such life-building is structured by the invisibilised and routinised day-to-day activities performed by localised migrant communities, which were shaped by years of labour migration from Ukraine to the EU. The question of ‘standing with Ukraine’ requires turning our attention to the question of who performs the bodily tasks of life-making amidst the displacement of millions of people. As Olena Fedyuk argues (as cited in Drążkiewicz et al., 2023, p. 138), ‘paradoxically, the arrival of families and dependents into the established migration networks brought to light the true cost of labour migration regimes’. In 2021 alone, Poland issued more than 740,000 temporary residence permits based on employment, the vast majority of which were granted to Ukrainian nationals (Eurostat, 2022). The article situates the current moment in the longer histories of migration as a displaced form of social reproduction (Apostolova & Hristova, 2021) within the context of the so-called ‘transition’ to capitalism in Ukraine, the focus of the next section.

Labour migration as a means of social reproduction in Ukraine

What has been recently theorised as austerity and precarisation of middle-class households in Western Europe has been a longer-term reality for many East European societies at least since 1989, further crosscut by gendered, ethnicised, sexualised, racialised and classed dimensions. In postsocialist Eastern Europe, the last 30 years of the ‘transition’ to capitalism have gone hand in hand with the worst peacetime population decline in history. This includes not only a drastic reduction in life expectancy but extensive out-migration (Ghodsee & Orenstein, 2021). In this context, the figure of a postsocialist migrant worker embodies the process of the deregulating, privatising and desocialising of the means of social reproduction, shifting it away from the public sphere (Apostolova & Hristova, 2021). As Apostolova and Hristova (2021) argue, emigration became a necessary part of a displaced model of social reproduction in the region, turning migration into the only mode for revitalising one’s life.

Ukraine is the world’s tenth-largest recipient of remittances in absolute terms, and in 2020 such remittances comprised 9.8% of the country’s GDP (World Bank, 2020). The post-Soviet dispossession of workers in Ukraine has served as a means of producing additional supplies of labour power (Lyubchenko, 2022). In 2018, 33% of remittances to Ukraine came from Poland, 32% from other EU member states, 9% from Russia and 9% from the United States and Canada (World Bank, 2020). Ukrainian migration is the largest of all post-USSR migratory movements to the EU (Fedyuk & Kindler, 2016). Ukrainians were migrating in the early 1990s to Central and Eastern Europe (mainly Poland and Czech Republic), when these countries were not EU member states at the time. No visas were required, and Ukrainian visitors to Poland only needed a passport with a tourist voucher or an invitation from a Polish citizen (Follis, 2012, p. 41). Visas for Ukrainian nationals were introduced in 2003, just a year before Poland’s accession to the EU, and a more complex visa system was introduced upon Poland’s joining the Schengen zone in 2007 (see Fedyuk & Kindler, 2016; Follis, 2012; for the history of Ukrainian migration). Since Russia’s military intervention in east Ukraine in 2014, a dramatically larger number of Ukrainians have been mobilised as labourers involved in jobs characterised as dirty, dangerous and precarious, sending money home to cover the gaps in state provision and compensate for the damage of war and militarisation (Lyubchenko, 2022). Since seeking asylum proved to be inefficient for those who fled the war in east Ukraine, many opted for alternative ways of regularising their stay such as employment and the Polish Charter (Karta Polaka – a document proving one’s Polish heritage; see Follis, 2012). The introduction of a visa-free regime for Ukrainian citizens in 2017, together with the liberalisation of regulations on the employment of foreigners in Poland and the proliferation of labour recruitment agencies, has made migrant workers from Ukraine into a significant pool of labour for Central and East European countries and Poland in particular (Fedyuk & Kindler, 2016). In 2018, Poland became the European leader in the temporary employment of migrant workers (OECD, 2018). Although the statistics on employers’ declarations and work permits do not reflect the real scale of Ukrainians’ involvement in the labour market, existing data before 2022 suggests that the majority of Ukrainian nationals work in the so-called secondary sector of the labour market, being employed mostly by private households, in construction, transport, retail and wholesale trade (Brunarska et al., 2016).

Against the backdrop of a ban on quota refugees in 2015 and ongoing violent expulsions of refugees on the Polish–Belarusian border (Babakova et al., 2022), Ukrainian nationals have been seen as ‘desirable’, ‘privileged’, potentially integrable workers and students due to their perceived ‘cultural’, linguistic and geographical proximity. This, however, has not protected them from institutional forms of bureaucratic violence and everyday forms of harassment (Krivonos, 2023a). To sum up, Ukrainian migrant workers have been produced through three simultaneously ongoing processes: (1) the feminisation of poverty though dispossessive austerity and post-Soviet capitalist development in Ukraine, (2) the commodification of care and (3) the exclusion of other, less-desirable migrant workers at the EU borders (Krivonos, 2023a; Lyubchenko, 2022). The three interconnected processes turned Ukraine into a frontier for Europe’s cheap social reproduction (Lyubchenko, 2022).

The conditional admission of Ukrainian migrant labour in Poland in greater numbers simultaneously with the expulsion of non-white non-European asylum seekers brings into sharp relief the role of race in enabling migration and people’s life chances, which until recently have been sidelined in the scholarly work on the region. Migration regimes that allowed the reception of mainly Ukrainian women and children after February 2022 began to temporarily racialise Ukrainian refugees as ‘deserving’ and white while restricting mobility to Black Ukrainians, ‘Global South’ nationals living in Ukraine and Ukrainian Roma, as well as non-white non-European asylum-seekers. Only 33% of Poles claim that Poland should give an opportunity to submit an asylum application at the Polish–Belarusian border, even though this is guaranteed by international and Polish law (Feliksiak, 2021 in Fomina & Pachocka, 2024). In addition, a temporary reframing of Ukrainian nationals as ‘white’ and ‘European’ has been a recent development itself, which can be understood as part of the politics of liberal racism (Krivonos, 2023a; Shmidt & Jaworsky, 2022). Previous research shows longer histories of imagining Ukraine as a marker of Europe’s civilisational frontier and the limit against which Poland claimed its Europeanness and progress (see e.g. Follis, 2012; also Mayerchyk & Plakhotnik, 2021). One in four Poles also expressed negative attitudes towards Ukrainians just before the war (Fomina & Pachocka, 2024). After 2022, Ukrainians sought employment in unequal labour markets, with service, education, accommodation and food service, wholesale and retail being top employment sectors for Ukrainian refugee women, and transportation, construction and manufacturing for Ukrainian refugee men (International Organization for Migration [IOM], 2023).

The labour of Ukrainian migrant workers fills in the gaps left by the destruction of the social infrastructure part of the ‘transition’ to capitalism in Poland. The shutting down of kindergartens, combined with shorter maternity leave and increased working hours, has led to a rapid increase in demand for migrant domestic workers (Fedyuk & Kindler, 2016). In line with this change, feminist philosopher Majewska (2022, p. 51) complicates some of the disembodied notions of solidarity with Ukraine by arguing for a recognition of the socioeconomic inequality between Ukraine and other Central and East European countries:

It [the act of solidarity] is even more complex after the recent decades of Ukrainian economic migration to Poland, when even some feminist and progressive friends of mine would pronounce the shameful and disgusting formula ‘my Ukrainian girl/woman’ to depict a babysitter, cleaning lady or cook; or ‘my Ukrainian guy’ to depict a construction worker, driver or factory worker, like as if they owned these immigrants.

Unlike other asylum-seekers, Ukrainian refugees received access to the Temporary Protection Directive, which was introduced in the aftermath of the wars in Yugoslavia in the 1990s but activated after Russia’s full-scale invasion for the first time (Łysienia, 2023). The Polish government also adopted a special-purpose legal act that gave Ukrainian refugees the same publicly funded services as Poles, such as welfare and employment rights. However, the assumption built into the directive is that Ukrainian nationals will return to Ukraine once the war is over, which makes the future of their temporary legal status unclear (Odynets, 2022). With a one-off cash benefit from the Polish state and one-time cash payment from the UN, wage work, communal labour and the aid sustained by migrant communities remain a key mode of reproducing refugee communities. From March 2023, citizens of Ukraine who stayed in Poland in collective accommodation centres became obliged to contribute to the costs of accommodation and meals (ReliefWeb, 2023). Ukrainian women are further pushed into ‘enforced single motherhood’ creating horizontal networks of mutual support to combine care, paid labour and bureaucratic responsibilities since Ukrainian men are not allowed to leave the country to join their families (Dutchak, 2023). Questions of social reproduction are becoming increasingly urgent against the backdrop of the massive destruction of care infrastructures. As many Ukrainian trade unionists and scholars argue, these infrastructures must be re-centred in post-war reconstruction plans, which are currently focused on investment prospects and capital accumulation through the erosion of social protection and the privatisation of social infrastructure (Dutchak, 2023; Yurchenko, 2023).

An ethnography among Ukrainian migrant workers and forced migrants in Warsaw

The article draws on ethnographic research conducted among Ukrainian nationals in Warsaw in 2020–2023. I first arrived in Warsaw in January 2020, with the aim of examining the circulation of transnational labour migrants across the Polish–Ukrainian border. Through personal networks, the snowballing method, participant observations in bus stations, events organised by Ukrainian NGOs and informal gatherings, I gained access to young people who were predominantly students or student workers (N = 18, 20–26 years old). Formally, most of these people stayed with student visas, although the boundary between being a worker and a foreign student was blurred, as most of them were involved in full-time labour in the service economy with insecure employment contracts or without formal contracts while pursuing their studies. Wage work also served as a means to ease the financial burden on their parents, who might otherwise incur debt to cover tuition fees for their children’s education in Poland. Despite this, higher education in Poland was often still more affordable than in Ukraine. To my knowledge, all the young people had a regular status in Poland, yet they all talked about coping with a border regime, months of waiting for residence permit decisions, rejected applications and bureaucratically induced temporality when they could not travel to Ukraine. My research participants’ irregular life rhythm, which was structured by morning, evening and night shifts at work, combined with lectures in university, underscores the time economy that structured their life condition.

I returned to Warsaw in May 2022 for follow-up research aiming to revisit my interlocutors amidst Russia’s full-scale invasion. My longer-term contacts in the field and the trust that I had acquired in previous years allowed me to return to the field. Over the years, I developed connections and friendships beyond my role as an outsider researcher, which has allowed me to stay in contact with my research participants between my visits. While initially I had planned to focus solely on my previous connections in the field, I also joined a group of volunteers at the railway station and other spaces, which brought new research encounters and connections. My research drifted towards the analysis of ‘grassroots’ humanitarianism (e.g. Fechter, 2023). The connections that I developed with other volunteers at the station also resulted in collaborative writing with key interlocutors in the field (Krivonos et al., 2024).

In addition to participant observation in the railway station and informal hangouts with Ukrainian volunteers, during that visit I conducted semi-structured interviews with young Ukrainian nationals living in Warsaw who had moved to Poland before and after the 2022 invasion (N = 11). Some were refugees who volunteered in humanitarian centres and found employment in the service sector. Others had moved to Poland as students or workers. The semi-structured interviews fluctuated between free-flowing conversations and questions in Russian and Ukrainian. After 2022, I stopped using the recorder, opting for more free-flowing conversations and walk-along interviews that allowed for a more informal atmosphere, and a rapport and space for interviewing me in return. Because of my Russian nationality, the interview situation inevitably led to my research interlocutors asking me questions about my position on the war, Russian society and Russian people’s attitudes towards the war. Some conversations lasted for up to five hours, with my research participants ‘interviewing’ me as much as I ‘interviewed’ them. For ethical reasons, I didn’t ask questions about the experience of fleeing the war unless the topic was brought up by my interlocutors themselves. I made ethnographic notes after our conversations, which I revisited later. In the period since the start of the full-scale invasion, one person declined to participate in the research project.

In line with Cerwonka and Malkki’s (2007) vision of fieldwork as improvisatory, I understand theory and ethnographic practice as intertwined and co-constructed in ethnographic research. The analysis is not a static process and a separate ‘stage’ that occurs after the ‘fieldwork’ when concepts are ‘applied’ to data. Instead, theoretical frameworks emerge dynamically through the interactions and experiences of fieldwork. My longer-term engagement in the field through several short-term visits since 2020 and participation in volunteer work allowed me to see the connections between labour migration and post-2022 forced displacement and the ordinariness of life-making labour performed by Ukrainian nationals. These findings emerged in the process of conducting ethnographic fieldwork and engaging with volunteer networks.

Below, I start my analysis by engaging with the life story told by Andrii, who came to Poland as an exchange student and later applied to study at a Polish university. Instead of providing several examples and interview excerpts from different interlocutors, I focus on Andrii’s story, which highlights broader findings while offering detailed insights into his life before and after 2022. This choice is informed by the ethic of engaging with the stories of interlocutors in more depth rather than using ‘a bunch of disembodied thoughts that come out of subjects’ mouths in interviews’ to merely illustrate research findings (Duneier & Back, 2006, p. 554). Andrii’s story is followed by observations from the Warsaw railway station in May–July 2022 and analysis of forms of misrecognised life-making labour that Ukrainian volunteers performed.

Andrii’s story: Hosting family members while working in a night-time economy

As we were drinking our coffees in the popular coffee chain Café Nero, Andrii started his story of migration by telling me about a student exchange programme, which gave him the opportunity to move to Poland:

I came to [a city in the north of Poland] as an exchange student. Unlike Ukrainian labour migrants, who work their asses off (jebashat), I knew I would be a student, that I would study and party. I really liked the place; it matched all my expectations about Poland . . .

For my research interlocutors who came to Poland as students, it was common to emphasise their difference from other Ukrainians, especially those who came as labour migrants and worked in factories, warehouses, construction and food production. Later Andrii joked that even though the programme was meant to be an ‘exchange’ for students between Poland and Ukraine, only Ukrainian young people travelled to Poland. He told me this while laughing – perhaps recognising his own position in this unequal relationship: ‘The exchange was one way (laughs); only Ukrainians were coming to Poland. Why would Polish students come to our provincial university in Ukraine?’

As we went on talking, the meaning of his laughter became clearer, along with the reality of the blurred boundary between the bureaucratic categories of ‘exchange student’ and ‘labour migrant’:

[In this Polish town], I got my first job, which didn’t really differ much from all other jobs that Ukrainian labour migrants do. It was a small Polish town, but every square metre of this town has a factory. I worked in a plastic factory; we called it ‘Kurwer’ (from kurwa, meaning ‘damn!’ in Polish), as the conditions of work matched the name (laughs): 8 hours of monotonous work.

They came to the university to offer us work in a factory. We could choose between a candy factory, a plastic factory and a fish factory. Many girls went to work in the candy factory, but after one week they switched to the plastic factory because their skin was covered with sugar at the end of the day. Eight hours of moving candies in boxes. . . . These were mostly Ukrainian exchange students who worked there.

Although officially he had moved to Poland as an ‘exchange student’, Andrii ended up working alongside other migrant workers from Ukraine. The fact that work recruiters came directly to the university to advertise work opportunities to Ukrainian exchange students reveals how foreign students become a pool of temporary migrant labour, which permanently sustains the factories. Andrii then offered more details about the everyday life of combining his student exchange with work in a factory and the daily routines that organised his life:

Luckily, everything in the town was so close, so you leave your night shift in the factory, come home, take a shower and go to the university to sleep. When the teacher noticed your sleeping, he would ask the other students: ‘Was he working?’ We would say, ‘yes, he was’, and then the teacher would not disturb him. So, I would say that 80% of people working there were Ukrainian exchange students, and the other 20% were Belarusians.

The reality of Ukrainian students, even those on exchange, working night shifts in the plants and catching up on sleep during lectures seemed to be a common practice, one which has become normalised also among the teaching staff. Andrii told me that he managed to save money while being on exchange in Poland and pay a share of his tuition fees a year later when he moved to Warsaw to pursue a bachelor’s degree. The money he had earned while working in the plastic factory as an exchange student was ‘returned’ to the Polish state and private university through the tuition fees (see also Krivonos, 2023b).

When I met Andrii again in May 2022, he told me about hosting his family and friends in his small studio apartment (kawalerka). While laughing and joking – perhaps, to lighten the mood surrounding the ongoing tragedy – he showed me a picture of seven people sleeping in his flat:

I would receive text messages from my friends saying, ‘Hey, I am coming to Warsaw for several days before I travel further into Europe’ (laughing). Clearly, they were not texting me to say that they would sleep in a hostel. Of course, they stayed at my place. This is how there were seven of us sleeping in my kawalerka. We found six sleeping places in my apartment, but there was no place left for me (laughing).

Andrii talked about hosting and caring for his family members and friends fleeing Ukraine: from finding safe routes out of Ukraine and helping his friends and family members escape to sharing home space with other people. After a couple of weeks, when his friends had left, he continued hosting his grandmother and his younger brother for almost a year, while his parents stayed in Ukraine. Andrii became the key care provider for his displaced family members. He joked about the challenges of sharing his home space with two close relatives belonging to different generations and having different needs, sleeping routines and day schedules: ‘Please, let’s not talk about how it feels living with your grandmother and younger brother at the same time’. This is the mundane, invisibilised everyday labour of care taking place in the private sphere away from the dominant lens of ‘crisis’ (Rai, 2024).

Literature on ‘everyday’ and ‘grassroots’ humanitarianism highlights the fact that ordinary people provide assistance and alternatives to established, formal institutions of aid, as happened in Poland (Cullen Dunn & Kaliszewska, 2023; Fomina & Pachocka, 2024). This research discusses how people craft kin relations with the people they support in the context of humanitarian aid since kinship (unlike e.g. friendship) implies equality and responsibility (Fechter, 2023). Crafting kin relations also provides a rationale for whom to support, solving the problem of limited resource allocation. But in Andrii’s case, kin relations already existed and did not need to be made. Unlike the ‘compassion fatigue’ experienced by local hosts from the majority population (e.g. Merikoski, 2022), moral obligations and intimate ties between family members, framed as a ‘labour of love’, make it harder to interrupt or simply stop offering this type of care, even when reaching the point of exhaustion (see also Gotby, 2019). Even though Andrii was physically and mentally depleted, asking his grandmother and brother to move out was out of the question because of the affective ties with his dear ones. Such ‘politics of exhaustion’ (Ansems de Vries, 2021; Emejulu & Bassel, 2020) become the structuring force in the crisis ordinariness.

Andrii had left his previous job right before the war began, and he had started a new part-time job working night shifts at a supermarket chain. He needed to sleep longer hours in the morning when his younger brother and grandmother were already awake in his small studio apartment. While he spoke with care, affection and humour about waking up to the smell of freshly cooked meatballs prepared by his grandmother every morning, he also talked about the difficulty of this new life arrangement, including lack of sleep and new care responsibilities. While previous research has explored how home is experienced when shared between ‘migrants’ and ‘citizens’ (e.g. Merikoski, 2022), home is also transformed when family members must adapt to each other’s routines, schedules and habits. His life now included not only waged work at night, which messed with his biological rhythms and depleted his body, but also helping his younger brother with school and online learning, taking care of his grandmother’s health and booking doctor’s appointments. Andrii would spend his days off showing his family around Warsaw and taking his younger brother to museums, playgrounds and exhibitions. He talked about experiencing the war and displacement as an ongoing condition involving shifting care arrangements in the context of separated family ties:

I really wanted my younger brother to learn something new, to introduce him to a bigger city, make him learn something new every day. I wanted to make him feel better in a new city, [for it to] feel like a home away from his parents and home.

The labour of what has been termed ‘emotional reproduction’ (Gotby, 2019), that is, creating an indispensable feeling of being cared for, is done by networks of precarious (student) migrant workers like Andrii, who had resided in Poland and had long powered EU labour markets. This is the emotional, embodied and relational labour of ‘carrying’ (Hall, 2023). Andrii, then, experiences the crisis not as a single, sudden interruption to his life but more as a constantly ongoing protracted site where the precarity of work, together with the labour of life-making in times of war, becomes the ordinary in his effort to maintain his own life and the lives of his family members.

In 2022, housing rents increased drastically due to high demand in a poorly regulated housing market in Warsaw. Andrii’s apartment was no exception, and the rent increased by 10% in a month’s time. The situation put even more pressure on Andrii as the only breadwinner in the family. His activities of caring for his displaced family members can easily become invisibilised and lost in more urgent disembodied accounts of ‘standing with Ukraine’. In such accounts, his actions can be regarded as a kind of extra-activity, as grounded in an affective motive, such as goodwill, love or charity (Illner, 2021), since this is the expected behaviour of someone ‘coming from Ukraine’ and having kinship networks in the country. Yet, when seen through the lens of the ‘ordinariness of life-making’, his day-to-day activities become indispensable for the reproduction of life in displaced conditions, which must be recognised as political work of the most meaningful kind.

What this story also makes visible is the overlooked role of young people and young men in the labour of social reproduction. Young men’s care activities often remain unrecognised, for example, with deportation decisions issued to fathers despite their strong ties with children (Leinonen & Pellander, 2013). Young people, particularly men without children, are rarely discussed in social reproduction literature, which comes from the assumption that they might have few care responsibilities or societal expectations to care for others. Yet, young people like Andrii are not only confronted with the need to reproduce their own lives as ‘student migrant workers’ in a neoliberal economy but take on life-making activities such as sending money to parents and caring for siblings and grandparents during the war, thus becoming key care providers for separated families. Andrii’s story adds to our vision of care between parents and children, towards relations across and between siblings, grandparents and grandchildren. In the following section, I dwell deeper into forms of labour that Ukrainian migrants performed for their communities through volunteer work. I argue that the misrecognition and neglect of this labour and these skills align with the broader disregard for the labour of care and social reproduction performed by some of the most socially vulnerable groups (Rai, 2024).

The ordinariness of unrecognised labour

Just like in other contexts involving aid and communal labour, spaces of help are produced through the unequal distribution of resources and (mis)recognition of skills (Pascucci, 2019). Many international volunteers working in the Warsaw central railway station, whom I met in late spring 2022, were hyper-mobile ‘expatriates’ who worked in the IT sector and for small international NGOs. They worked remotely for the companies in their home countries or took a holiday or even a leave of absence to travel to Warsaw. Others were students studying East European, Russian or Ukrainian languages, to whom volunteer work gave experience and language training. By June 2022, many international volunteers started to leave Warsaw as they were returning to work and family obligations. In other cases, the EU migration regime required foreign nationals to regularise their own status after 90 days of staying in Poland (as in the case of US and Canadian citizens). Volunteering in the railway station meant intense direct communication with Ukrainian people, which required good language skills. The growing fatigue of local communities and international volunteers became increasingly visible even if aid did not disappear completely (e.g. Grzymała-Kazłowska et al., 2023).

Those who stayed the longest were Ukrainian volunteers, many of whom were migrant workers or had been displaced by the war themselves. This ordinariness of crisis includes engaging in various forms of unpaid volunteer work, even as those volunteer workers are sustained by their own wage labour in the service economy, and support from broader migrant networks and families. This labour of keeping life going is based on a wide range of skills: from emotional labour and emotional reproduction and resistance to stress to linguistic skills, including knowledge of the city’s logistics and skills in searching for information. Many such skills are recognised as ‘natural’ by virtue of one simply ‘coming from Ukraine’ – similar to other contexts of gendered and racialised reproductive labour based on the devaluation of skills (Federici, 2019; Rai, 2024). In addition to helping and listening to people in distress, the volunteer work was embodied and physically taxing like standing for many hours and helping people carry their heavy luggage. One story became anecdotal yet revealing physical exhaustion of volunteer work. Only three broken chairs were available at the railway station for more than a dozen volunteers, leading to simultaneously fierce and ironic competition in the hope of relaxing one’s back muscles even if a bit.

The railway station served as an information point for recently established foreign organisations and NGOs helping Ukrainian refugees with visa application forms and flight tickets to other countries. The organisations relied on highly educated young Ukrainian people who spoke English, Ukrainian, Russian and Polish and could communicate information between the heads of office and refugees on the ground. The labour performed by these young people was indispensable because of their ‘localised knowledge’ and linguistic competence. One of the volunteers, Alina, a student at a local university, told me about how she would receive phone calls from unknown people asking her questions about their visa applications around the clock. While performing non-waged work that can conventionally be classified as ‘highly skilled’, some found paid work as cleaners and shop assistants in souvenir shops in the afternoons to make a living.

After the temporary funding that created some NGOs started to dry up, the young nationals in Warsaw who had been volunteering for them continued to juggle between performing wage labour in the service economy and unpaid volunteer work – in addition to making donations and hosting family members. Olena, who volunteered as a translator for one North American organisation, started to apply for jobs and asked for a recommendation letter hoping to receive credit from what she saw as an organisation with international prestige. To my knowledge, she never obtained the letter of recommendation. The differential precarities and differences between ‘international’ and local Ukrainian volunteers reproduce the porous and contested ‘local versus international’ divide previously observed in other contexts of humanitarianism (Carruth & Freeman, 2021; Pascucci, 2019). Olena told me that she was able to move to Warsaw because her mother had lived there and had been working for several years as a domestic worker. In previous years, she had only seen her mother for two weeks a year, when she was visiting home in Ukraine. She moved to Warsaw together with her younger sister: ‘Where would I go if we didn’t have our mother living in Poland?’

Even though the young people were not remunerated for their efforts, it was common to hear references to volunteering as ‘work’. Young people volunteering for the organisations exhibited discipline, as many worked in the station for eight hours a day. One evening, when spending time in a bar after completing a shift in the railway station, some people joked that they were not going to stay up late since they needed to ‘be at work tomorrow’: ‘Are you coming to work tomorrow?’ was the question they typically asked before saying their goodbyes. As expected, we all met at the railway station the next day. While I came at midday, Alina, a Ukrainian volunteer who had fled east Ukraine, came at 10 and stayed until 6 in the evening, just like the day before.

These young people are members of communities whose predicaments they both share and understand. But the intense emotional involvement is also draining and retraumatising (Hassouneh & Pascucci, 2022). While helping others, Olena nursed her own trauma when checking the news on shelling in her hometown, where her own family was living at the time. These forms of affective labour and feelings of responsibility to the broader Ukrainian community also compensate for the ‘compassion fatigue’ and lack of material remuneration for such labour. Meanwhile, the young people remaking the lives of others through volunteering are themselves sustained by their own families, being part of long-term networks of labour migration.

Conclusions

The article argued for the ordinariness of life-making as an analytical lens for understanding the remaking of life in forced displacement – the work that is often done by migrant and refugee workers themselves. Applying the dominant lens of ‘crisis’ to understand the arrival of millions of refugees obscures fuller accounts of just who makes life continue in the shadows of solidarity fatigue and the organised abandonment of social welfare infrastructures. The ordinariness of life-making operates through the continuities between pre-2022 labour migration and the social reproduction performed by members of those migrant communities, who themselves had been forced to remake their lives abroad amidst the drastic privatisation of the social sphere in Ukraine.

The analysis does not romanticise practices of collective survival, which can easily be subsumed under a rubric of ‘resilience’. On the contrary, my argument is that the organised abandonment of socialised modes of remaking lives relies structurally on precariously employed, localised communities caring for each other. The focus on the ordinariness as opposed to the disruption makes it possible to see how capitalist dispossession continues to operate as intended, that is, as a means of outsourcing life-making to those who are already on the receiving end of depletion (Rai, 2024). While EU states and the Temporary Protection Directive opened the possibility to achieve a regular status in the EU, though not extended to other non-European, non-white asylum seekers, the focus here has been on older networks of labour migration from Ukraine that bore the weight of continuing to manage the ‘crisis ordinariness’. The arrival of millions of displaced people is a question of the ever-ongoing labour of social reproduction performed by embodied and socially located workers subsumed within the circles of precarious labour. In particular, the article highlighted the overlooked role of young people and young men doing labour of social reproduction across networks of kinship.

This is an invitation to view practices of mutual aid as part of a wider totality of reproductive labour extending beyond the unpaid activities in a household extensively theorised by social reproduction feminism literature. The practices of remaking life in displacement are a continuation of a longer history of capitalist dispossession in a postsocialist region that pushed people into labour mobility to escape conditions of social unsustainability (Apostolova, 2021). The neglect of the ordinariness of life-making among migrant communities not only risks reproducing the figure of a ‘grateful refugee’ as a passive recipient of humanitarian assistance but also the narrative of ‘care for distant others’ as part and parcel of humanitarian apparatuses. It further invisibilises the waged labour of migrant workers who have long sustained EU economies, with EU states often paying nothing for the social reproduction of these lives. These past and present histories of the circulation of ‘restless bodies’ (Apostolova, 2021) must be urgently recovered to better understand the protracted ordinariness of life-making in displacement.