Ukrainian refugees’ reception in Swedish sports clubs: ‘deservingness’ and ‘promising victimhood’

Don't Mind the Hypocrisy: a Commentary on Differentiated Treatment in Refugee Reception

“…As known from previous works (e.g., Eliassi 2013Eliassi , 2015Eliassi , 2017, 'othering' (cultural) processes take place within social work at different levels, and the case of Ukrainian refugees might be a watershed moment where these treatments come about as vividly different. As suggested elsewhere (Blomqvist Mickelsson, 2023), institutions and organizations that in some sense provide a welfare function now need to incorporate anti-racist information and education to properly combat these 'hierarchies of victims' and the different treatment these hierarchies create. This is, of course, imperative within the profession and discipline of social work which has one of its core functions to protect and preserve minorities' rights.…”

“…Ukrainians have also been welcomed into Swedish civil society organizations, such as sports clubs, because of conceived similar experiences of sports, whereas other refugee groups have been problematized as difficult to integrate since they 'lack' the understanding of Swedish sports in general (Blomqvist Mickelsson 2023;, despite the fact that sports policy in Sweden postulates that sport should strive to be as inclusive as possible. In short, this can be conceived of as a transfer of cultural capital, but it is also an important and problematic structural issue that prevents people without this capital from partaking on equal conditions.…”

The role of place in everyday life of Ukrainian war refugees in Poland

“…The exodus of war refugees from Ukraine triggered, not only in Poland, a wave of phenomena occurring along the axis of the Ukrainian war refugee -the host society. Papers appeared in the literature reporting on, among other things: migration preferences (Elinder et al, 2023), psychological consequences of the refugee role in the host society and the care of war victims (Duray-Parmentier, 2022; Greeneway et al, 2022), the dynamics of attitudes towards refugees (Kirk, 2022;Mois et al, 2024), vulnerability of refugees in the host country (Mendola & Pera, 2022), institutional arrival infrastructures in refugees' home-making (Kox & van Liempt, 2022;Holovko & Korolyk-Boyko, 2022), refugee narratives created in the media (Zawadzka-Paluektau, 2023), the future of Ukraine's population (Kulu et al, 2023), relations between refugees and the new home (Korobanova & Schulzhenko, 2022) and the construction of 'hierarchies of victims' (Mickelsson, 2023a).…”