Professional managing and negotiating refugee education in a context of risk and temporality

Drawing on interviews with managers from the municipal administration, school leaders, teachers, and teaching assistants, this presentation discusses reception of Ukrainian children seen from a welfare professional perspective. The interview study is supplemented by observations from classrooms and teaching situations and teacher-parent meetings. The situation of receiving refugees from Ukraine was unprecedented, yet neither migration nor organising refugee education is a new phenomenon. Informed by a postmigration perspective (Petersen & Schramm 2016, Foroutan, 2019, Römhild 2017), the presentation explores how municipal managers and frontline welfare professionals in schools negotiate the challenges and dilemmas of receiving refugees from Ukraine in 2022, focusing on experiences of crisis, temporariness and conflicting considerations (cf. Jacobsen & Piekut 2022). A special focus is on how professionals compare and negotiate the situation of the Ukrainians related to reception of other migrant groups who do not enjoy the same rights. Furthermore, the presentation includes a focus on the professional actors’ considerations in relation to the municipalities’ chosen organization of reception of Ukrainian children in education. Both on a municipal and school level we focus on the discourses on Ukrainian children’s (un)readiness regarding contact with majority Danish children either temporarily as visitors or as full-time students in general, Danish classes.