Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

This paper examines private hosting of Ukrainian refugees in Poland as a fragile, negotiated form of solidarity sustained despite unequal dependencies, moral tensions, and everyday domestic frictions within host–refugee relations.

Paper long abstract

Following Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, Poland emerged as a primary destination for refugees, resulting in a significant display of social solidarity. Among large-scale humanitarian responses, private hosting became a prevalent and intimate form of support, with over 500,000 Ukrainians accommodated in Polish households. Although widely celebrated, this support developed within relationships characterized by legal and economic inequalities, cultural hierarchies, and longstanding geopolitical imaginaries between Poles and Ukrainians.

Based on ongoing ethnographic fieldwork conducted since 2024 in western Poland, this paper examines host-refugee relations as sites where solidarity is enacted through everyday domestic routines. Instead of focusing solely on public discourse, the analysis investigates how care, gratitude, irritation, restraint, and mutual expectations are negotiated within shared households. It further explores how both hosts and refugees engage in continuous emotional and moral labour to sustain relationships that are supportive yet asymmetrical.

This paper theorizes solidarity not as a fixed ethical stance but as a fragile social achievement, produced through caregiving, boundary-making, and conflict avoidance. These relationships persist not due to the elimination of inequalities, but because such inequalities are managed or reconfigured through intimate interactions. Private homes therefore serve as infrastructures of solidarity, translating geopolitical conflicts into everyday routines of cohabitation and mutual adjustment.

By foregrounding the relational and affective dimensions of hosting, this paper contributes to debates on solidarity that move beyond activism and institutional humanitarianism. The analysis demonstrates how care, paternalism, and moral obligation become intertwined in domestic encounters across significant differences in positionality.