At the Foot of the Mountain: Temporalities of Production and Social Reproduction of Ukrainian Refugee Women in the Czech Republic

Abstract This article examines how state-imposed temporalities intersect with production and social reproduction to structure the precarity of Ukrainian refugee women. I build on the analytical framework on temporalities of production and social reproduction in two key directions: first, I argue that migrant and refugee workers navigate not only employer-driven regimes of time but also a state-imposed temporality that regulates immigration status and access to social rights, and second, I explore how the seasonality of tourism work reinforces precarity. Drawing on fieldwork with Ukrainian refugee women in the Czech Republic, I show how state policies immobilise refugees, while simultaneously pressuring them into precarious work. In response, many refugee women exit into informality in the face of constraints imposed by both state institutions and exploitative employers. At the same time, the growing individualisation of social reproduction responsibilities, in the absence of institutional support, exacerbates their precarity. By exposing the ways in which sovereign power and capitalist interests synchronise to regulate migrant women’s time and labour, this article highlights how the temporality of migration control serves not only to exclude refugees but also to incorporate them into circuits of labour exploitation.