Critical Temporalities: The educational trajectories of refugee children from Ukraine

The article deals with the issue of education of children from refugee families. The concept of critical temporalities provides a framework for thinking about these young people's threatened present and future. The aim is to show how the temporalities of different institutions and spaces interact and navigate the life courses of young people at one of the key moments in their lives, namely the moment of choosing high school. The situation is traced with the example of several refugee students who were seeking high school admission in the school year 2022/2023. Article shows how different temporalities enter the choices of subsequent educational careers. Everything happens in the interaction of multiple timescales – institutional, everyday and biographic – in the country of origin and in the country of destination. There are biographical timescales not only of the children, but also of the parents, which determine the future and present of the students. In addition to the institutional timescales of school, the adolescence phase and the temporality of war play a significant role.