EASA2026 "Anthropology: Possibilities in a Polarised World"
Photo by Aleksandra Dzik
In her paper, Natalia Bloch analysed hierarchies of deservingness of care and hospitality and the processes of constructing the "ideal victim"/"true refugee" through categories such as gender, ethnicity/race, place of origin and social class, while Aleksandra Krzyżaniak examined the private hosting of Ukrainian refugees in Polish homes as a fragile, negotiated form of solidarity, sustained despite legal, economic and cultural inequalities and everyday domestic tensions between hosts and those they host.
These hierarchies – ranging from vulnerability to privilege – were constructed on the basis of place of origin (and its presumed safety), social class, gender and ethnic origin.
In addition, Natalia Bloch co-organised the panel "Mobilities under War Anxiety: Conditional Privilege and Polarised Imaginaries" together with Agne Gintalaite of Vytautas Magnus University in Kaunas (Lithuania) and Terje Toomistu of the University of Tartu and Tallinn University (Estonia). The panel, affiliated with the Anthromob network bringing together researchers of mobility, generated enormous interest and gathered 10 papers, most of them addressing mobilities resulting from Russia's full-scale war against Ukraine.
Both researchers also played a significant role in organising the conference as a whole, which brought together nearly 2,200 participants in total, close to 1,700 of them in person: Natalia Bloch as co-chair, and Aleksandra Krzyżaniak as secretary of the Local Organising Committee.
During the largest international anthropological event in the history of the discipline held in Poland – the European Association of Social Anthropologists' EASA2026 conference "Anthropology: Possibilities in a Polarised World", organised at AMU (Institute of Anthropology and Ethnology) on 21–24 July 2026 – the results of our research were presented by the project leader Natalia Bloch and doctoral researcher Aleksandra Krzyżaniak in the papers: "More and Less Deserving Victims. Hierarchies of Deservingness in the Private Hosting of Ukrainian Refugees in Poland" and "Intimate Solidarities and Moral Asymmetries: Hosting Ukrainian Refugees in Polish Homes".