Grievable and ungrievable lives in the reception classroom. Danish reception class teachers between policy, politics and professional ideals in the encounter with Ukrainian students

When geopolitical tensions on a global scale lead to new patterns of displacement and forced migration, teachers in reception classes in the receiving countries are among the first welfare professionals to meet new groups of newcomers. This was the case in 2015 when reception class teachers in the Nordic countries received large numbers of Syrian students, and in the wake of Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Ukrainian students rapidly grew to constitute a significant group of newcomers in reception classes not only in Denmark, but across the Nordics. Reception of new, varying and heterogenous groups of newcomer students are thus at the heart of reception professionalism. <br/><br/>However, the reception of Ukrainian students seems to have left experienced Danish reception class teachers with profound feelings of professional inadequacy (e.g. Daugaard et al., 2025: Jensen et al, accepted), and this paper presentation aims to shed light on this dilemma. The presentation draws on a serendipi-tous encounter between two research projects, a national Danish interdisciplinary research project on re-ception of Ukrainian students in Danish schools and a local collaborative language pedagogical research and development project. Empirically, the presentation draws on a series of group interviews with reception class teachers in municipal segregated reception classes, targeted at newcomers aged 14-18, in a lower sec-ondary school in Jutland, Denmark. The presentation lays forward a linguistic ethnographic analysis (Creese, 2010) anchored in Butler’s (2010) conceptualisation of grievable and ungrievable lives. Building on the concept of differential distribution of grievability, Butler describes how the lives of some groups or populations are consistently framed as worthy and deserving of official mourning, thereby appearing as eminently grievable, while the lives of others remain ungrievable. <br/><br/>In the presentation, Butler’s thinking is brought to the reception classroom and used to understand and discuss the intense emotional and moral dilemmas and profound feelings of professional inadequacy among a small sample of Danish reception class teachers in the wake of the encounter with Ukrainian newcomer students. While the analytical focus on the reception of the Ukrainian students in a particular moment in time and space can be considered an extreme case (Flyvbjerg, 2006), its relevance extends beyond the local Danish context as well as beyond the reception of Ukrainian students and provides general insights into the complex dynamics of production of linguistic (in)equality in everyday school life in the Nordic countries.