Guest lecture "Between Protection and Utility: Private Hosting of Ukrainian Refugees and the Commodification of Refugeehood in Provincial Poland"

The presentation will examine the ambivalent role of private hosting in the reception of refugees from Ukraine in Poland after Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted in western Poland, it explores how humanitarian shelter became entangled with labour market incorporation, moral expectations, and broader state narratives of refugee self-reliance. In provincial towns and rural areas, private hosting often extended beyond hospitality in private homes to include employer-organised accommodation, farm-based arrangements, community-funded rentals, and other semi-private forms of shelter. These arrangements frequently relied on pre-existing infrastructures of Ukrainian labour migration and blurred the boundary between war refugee and labour migrant.

The presentation argues that private hosting became a key site where protection was increasingly conditioned by usefulness. Refugees were often expected to become economically independent very quickly, while hosts frequently assumed the role of integration facilitators, encouraging immediate labour market participation. In employment-based and agricultural settings, access to accommodation could be tied to expectations of work, reciprocity, and gratitude, revealing the moral economy underpinning these arrangements. More broadly, the Polish response to displacement from Ukraine illustrates a shift from humanitarianism to utilitarianism, in which refugeehood is increasingly assessed through employability, productivity, and adaptability. The talk therefore reflects on private hosting as both a practice of care and a mechanism through which refugee protection becomes privatised, instrumentalised, and partially commodified.

Zbigniew Szmyt is an Associate Professor at the Department of Anthropology and Ethnology and a researcher at the Centre for Migration Studies at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, Poland. He is a social anthropologist working on migration, forced displacement, refugee reception, and Polish–Ukrainian social relations. His recent research focuses on the private hosting of refugees from Ukraine in Poland, anti-war activism among ethnic minorities from Russia, and the politics of mobility and displacement in borderland settings.