Manifestations of (Mis)Recognition Amongst Germany-based Refugee Women from Ukraine

This research focuses on 10 case studies drawn from a corpus of 50 interviews with displaced Ukrainian women based in Berlin and Frankfurt/Oder and considers the extent to which Ukrainian refugee women arriving in Germany over the last two years might have experienced misrecognition within their everyday experiences. Following Honneth’s (1996) understanding of recognition in terms of self-confidence, self-respect and self-esteem, manifestations of recognition and misrecognition are centered around our Ukrainian interlocutors’ communicated experiences. Recognition or the lack thereof impacts our interlocutors’ sense of self and belonging in their new environments. According to our analysis, recognition manifested as ambivalent inclusion through recognition via [potential] employers, government officials or within interlocutors’ personal lives; it was equally highly contingent on interlocutors’ self-identification–personally (e.g. by their region of origin) or professionally (e.g. as activists, [prospective] employees), with obvious material (e.g. economic) and symbolic (communicative) components.