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.