Authors

Discussion

My research examines how remote work changes the refugee experience, both in terms of self-understanding, and the relationships relokanty forge with the host state.  I explore the case of fleeing Russians and Ukrainians at the onset of the Russia-Ukraine War (2022) to understand how those with remote employment conceive of their identity, socio-economically impact their place of landing, and become visible to the host state. Retaining employment during migration endows individuals with privilege: relative financial security despite possible socio-economic and identarian tensions in the receiving state. TeleRelokanty are unlike other migrants who face economic separation from their physical place of work. Deriving their name from “Relokant” as used in Russian-publishing news sources to refer to those who migrated out of Russia and Ukraine since 2022, I adopt the prefix “tele” to discuss those who continue to earn an income remotely. 

This puzzle spans three levels of analysis: (1) refugee self-understanding; (2) local reception; and (3) bottom-up conceptions of state responses. By structuring the research according to these tiers of analysis, my project is attuned to the fluidity and intersectionality of the refugee experience, capturing more widely the array of actions and inactions that signal refugees’ allegiances post-mobility, probing questions of loyalty and dissidence. My work relies on semi structured interviews with Russians and Ukrainians in Kazakhstan, and ultimately, presents a decentralized narrative of migration experiences, spanning differences of relative privilege within the precarious experience of migration.