Paper Short Abstract:

The paper offers insight into the private hosting of almost 100 Ukrainian refugees in a Polish village. It asks whether this bottom-up care has transformative potential, particularly in the context of the UE’s plans to develop an alternative form of refugee reception beyond collective accommodation.

Paper Abstract:

The residents of Poland, who often had no activist background or intercultural competence, spontaneously hosted hundreds of thousands of refugees fleeing the 2022 war in Ukraine. This is an unprecedented phenomenon, given the previous, rather unwelcoming attitude of Polish society towards refugees, which was the result of anti-refugee discourse developed since 2015. This care at the village level was even more unexpected given the lack of resources and expertise in assisting refugees in this humanitarian crisis which required not only hosting refugees but also providing them with both instrumental and psychological support.

The paper is based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in a village in Western Poland that hosted almost 100 refugees. Its objective is not only to scrutinise the motivations of the particular actors involved in providing this care – among others, the village head, the rural women association, and the host families – but to explore the dynamics, advantages, and limitations of this bottom-up and spontaneous response in the face of the State’s negligence. The category of care is analysed here within the framework of “everyday humanitarianism” (Richey 2018) and “encounters across difference” (Tsing 2005, Bloch 2021), and poses the question of whether it has had the transformative potential for both the hosts and hosted refugees. This question is particularly relevant given that the European Union foresees the development of a European model of the so-called refugee sponsorship (Reynolds, Clark-Kazak 2019) as an alternative form of refugee reception beyond collective housing, the latter being criticised for its counter-integration results.