The ROCIT project was again strongly represented at the 23rd IMISCOE Annual Conference in Girona, held between 29 June and 2 July 2026, under the theme “Strengthening Migration Studies through Community Engagement.” As one of the world’s leading conferences in migration research, the event brought together scholars from across disciplines to discuss pressing challenges facing migration studies and displaced communities.
As part of the conference programme, Kamila Fiałkowska, Principal Investigator of the ROCIT project organised and chaired the panel “Limits to Citizenship and Unequal Citizenship Constellations in the Context of Forced Migration and Displacement.” The panel contributions were discussed by Ignacy Jóźwiak, whose insightful comments helped situate the contributions within broader debates on citizenship, inequality, and decolonial perspectives.
The panel examined how citizenship is experienced, negotiated, and contested in the context of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine and the resulting displacement. Bringing together perspectives on internally displaced persons, refugees, diasporic communities, and racialised minorities, the presentations explored how citizenship is fragmented and differentiated, while also highlighting the ways in which displaced people actively reshape social and political boundaries through everyday practices and collective mobilisation.
The session featured four presentations:
Oleksandra Tarkhanova (University of St. Gallen) analysed how refugees from Ukraine and internally displaced persons maintain, renegotiate, and reimagine their relationships with the Ukrainian state. Drawing on qualitative interviews, her presentation demonstrated how experiences of displacement reshape attachments to citizenship and national belonging.
Ignacy Jóźwiak, a member of the ROCIT team, presented findings from ethnographic research on uneven citizenship among Ukrainian Roma. Focusing on the lack of identity documents among many Ukrainian Roma, he showed how documentation gaps severely restrict mobility, access to protection, and recognition of citizenship rights during wartime. The presentation also highlighted the role of Roma organisations and grassroots initiatives in supporting access to documentation as important enactments of citizenship.
Anna Matyska and Dominika Blachnicka-Ciacek (University of Warsaw) introduced the concept of affective citizenship to examine how the Russo-Ukrainian war has transformed diasporic mobilisation among Ukrainians living in Poland, Israel, and the United States. Their research explored the emotional dimensions of belonging, solidarity, and expectations directed towards diaspora communities during wartime.
Kamila Fiałkowska (Centre of Migration Research, University of Warsaw) presented her research on the sensory dimensions of citizenship among displaced Ukrainian Roma. Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork conducted with internally displaced Roma in Ukraine and forced migrants in Poland, the presentation examined how citizenship is embodied and experienced through everyday sensory practices, including food, clothing, music, smells, and bodily presence. It argued that these practices reveal how recognition, belonging, and Europeanness are negotiated from the margins, challenging dominant understandings of who is recognised as a legitimate citizen in times of war.
The panel showcased the central themes of the ROCIT project, demonstrating how citizenship cannot be understood as a fixed legal status but rather as an uneven, lived, and embodied process shaped by race, displacement, mobility, and everyday practices. The lively discussion that followed the presentations highlighted the importance of bringing ethnographic perspectives and community-engaged research into contemporary debates on forced migration, citizenship, and social justice.
