Paper short abstract:

The paper focuses on refugee children from Ukraine. It asks how their educational trajectory is set in different temporalities that determine their uncertain/contested childhood. I argue that the management of temporalities in relation to education contributes to their social landscape navigation.

Paper long abstract:

The lived temporalities of citizens take place coherently on many levels, and then the life of the citizen is constructed as a continuity. In contrast, migrants face 'critical temporalities' (Baas and Yeoh 2019). "Intersections between multiple 'timescales' - institutional, biographical and everyday - produce specific experiences of time" (Robertson 2022: 169). Continuities are disrupted and migrants live in regimes of discontinuities, simultaneities and ruptures experienced in the context of transnational migration (Acedera and Yeoh 2019).

The war in Ukraine has put millions of people on the move, especially mothers with children. These refugees were also heading to the Czech Republic. The dynamics of war events and its media images, the attitudes and practices of Czech society, and the legislation of the Czech and Ukrainian states transformed the planning of the near but also distant futures of migrants and their families (biographical time). They also framed their everyday routines. This situation was reflected in the education of refugee children.

This paper will focus on the schooling of refugee children. It will look at how differently parents and their children understood the temporality of their refugeehood versus the temporality of childhood or education. The aim is to show how these two temporalities were reflected in the process of educational decision-making, how they influenced children's school entry, engagement in learning and the maintenance of distance learning within Ukrainian schools. It will show how continuities, simultaneities and ruptures play a role in navigating the social landscape of childhood and education.