Biological Citizenship across Borders: Experiences of Disabled Ukrainian Refugees in the EU

• In Event: Stories of Disability Liberation in Eastern Europe: Art, Migration, (De)institutionalization, and Ecology

Abstract

This project tracks ethnographically the experiences of disabled refugees from Ukraine living in EU countries. The paper centers critical yet rarely explored aspects of migration experience: how chronically ill and disabled refugees and asylum seekers become “biological citizens” of foreign states, tied to those states through radical and unfamiliar medical diagnoses, life-altering bio-surgical interventions, and associated forms of care and control. Ultimately, the project asks how disabled Ukrainians become particular kinds of biomedical subjects in the EU, with what results for them and their families, and what underlying ideas about Ukraine and Ukrainians motivate these subject-making processes.

Author

• Sarah Drue Phillips, Indiana U Bloomington