Katharina Wiedlack in collab. with the GAIN – Gender: Ambivalent In_Visibilities research platform at the Univ. of Vienna (Web)

Time: Fr., 02.06.2023, 6:30 pm
Venue: Universität Wien Hauptgebäude, Hörsaal 1, Universitätsring 1, 1010 Wien

This presentation places US discourses of Ukrainian migration following Russia’s 2022 invasion and of post-Soviet migration following the fall of European state socialism in the late 1980s in the framework of CRT and US migration and refugee studies. Post-Soviet migrants are generally represented as fundamentally different from other contemporary, nonwhite US migrants through association with mythologized narratives of turn of the twentieth century Europeans who achieved full integration into a pan-European whiteness through upward mobility and the severing of transnational ties. Following Russia’s invasion, the US media began to acknowledge the transnationality of Ukrainian Americans in ways that render this portion of the post-Soviet diaspora more similar to other US migrants, while also employing critical narratives of whiteness to highlight the preferential admission of the Ukrainian refugees in European countries and the United States when compared to migrant populations racialized as nonwhite. As this coverage rightly highlights the racialization of US and European migration policies, it has also obscured the deterioration of their migration and refugee systems, as manifested in the inadequacy of even this more privileged response to Ukrainian refugee migration.

Claudia Sadowski-Smith is a professor at the Arizona State University.

Source: Newsletter der Forschungsplattform GAIN