Navigating the gendered geopolitics of the EU’s Temporary Protection: the complex return trajectories of Ukrainian women between Belgium and Ukraine

PhD student: Hannah Grondelaers
Summary: Starting from Ukrainian women’s unique return trajectories between Belgium and Ukraine in the context of the EU’s Temporary Protection, this research project investigates how different scales produce imaginaries that shape the women’s trajectories in different ways. As an exceptional measure to offer protection throughout the EU to mainly Ukrainian women fleeing Russia’s war in Ukraine, Temporary Protection (TP) has introduced a legal framework that allows for a unique type of pendular return mobility between host states and Ukraine. Upon activation of TP, discourses of deservingness of protection based on gender and on belonging to a racialised Europeanness, laid bare particular imaginaries that spurred this act of solidarity. This research project investigates how imaginaries on different scales shape questions of both integration and return and in this way affect Ukrainian women’s return trajectories on the personal scale.
PhD in Social Work
Promoter(s): Ine Lietaert, Robin Vandevoordt (Unu-Cris Migration And Social Policy Cluster)
Periode of time: November 2024 - October 2028