Oksana Shmulyar Gréen
Senior Lecturer
Department of Sociology and WorkAbout Oksana Shmulyar Gréen
About Oksana Shmulyar Gréen Oksana Shmulyar Gréen is an Associate Professor in Sociology, working as a senior lecturer and researcher at the Department of Sociology and Work Science at University of Gothenburg with a broad international experience in education and research. She received her Bachelor Degree in Sociology at Kyiv State University in Ukraine. Her M.A. degree in Sociology has been awarded jointly by the Central European University in Prague and Lancaster University in Great Britain. She took her Ph.D. in Sociology in December 2009, at the Department of Sociology, University of Gothenburg. Her thesis focused upon development of entrepreneurship in Russia both historically and in our time, as well as on the broader issues of capitalism, market economy and societal transformations in Russia. Oksana Shmulyar Gréen worked as a researcher at the universities in Prague, Vienna, and St. Petersburg, and while in Sweden at the universities of Växjö and Gothenburg.
During 2010-2012 Oksana Shmulyar Gréen was a director of studies for a new international master programme in Strategic Human Resource Management and Labour Relations. Since 2021 she represents the Faculty of Social Science as a board member for the CERGU. Since 2017 she is a board member of the Human Rights steering group at the Faculty of Social Science, University of Gothenburg.
Specialist fields Mobility within the EU, family and migration, migration decision making, transnational families and care, children and migration, children and agency, formal and informal social security provision, transnational belonging and identity, life-course perspective, welfare and gender policies, family practices, parenting and care, welfare in East and Central Europe, domestic work and global division of labour, societal development, migration and forced displacement from Ukraine due to the war since feb 2022.
Completed research During 2015-2018 Oksana Shmulyar Gréen worked in the research project (together with Prof. Ingrid Höjer as project leader and Charlotte Melander, both from the Department of Social work) Care-giving arrangements in the enlarged Europe: migrants’ parental strategies and the role of institutional context in Sweden funded by FORTE. The project aimed to study how post-accession EU citizens who parents arrange care across the national borders when they come to work to Sweden and how these care-giving arrangements are enabled or challenged by the institutional context of Sweden with regard to welfare, migration laws, gender and working time regimes.
During 2019-2023 Oksana was ivolved in the research project funded by FORTE, Transnational childhoods: building of significant relationships among Polish and Romanian migrant children after reunification with parents in Sweden. In this project Höjer (leader), Shmulyar Gréen and Melander, explored the ways in which migrant children and young people re-define and create significant social relationships in local and transnational social spaces. This study dreaw upon qualitative interviews with children and young people who were between 10 and 18 years old when they came to Sweden, and lived in the country for at least one year. Other methods were visual life-line and network maps.
Current research During 2019-2024, she leads the VR funded project Where do I belong and who do I care about?: experiences of mobility, care and negotiation of belonging among children of East European EU workers' in Sweden. This study aims to contribute to an understanding of how children and young people themselves navigate the EU mobility space and the ways in which they construct a sense of belonging locally and transnationally. The empirical data for this explorative project will be collected using the SCB’s new database on children and their families in Sweden, as well as focus groups, qualitative interviews and participatory activities in places and spaces identified as important for migrant youths. Children’s age, gender are agency are central analytical concepts the project will apply when conceptualising mobility through various stages of the entire family life-course. In so doing, the study seeks to shed the light on the voices of children and young people as active participants of the European mobility space and as co-creators of relationships within this space, where loss and longing are central to how children navigate in a new society and negotiate their belonging.
Since 2023, research on Ukraine and specifically, the reception of Ukrainians in Sweden since the Russia's full scale invasion, has been one of the central concerns for Oksana Shmulyar Gréen. As a member of research networks FORUM and HROMADA (see below), she together with Svitlana Odynets is involved in a pilot project on Forced migrants from Ukraine in transnational Europe- Between personal agency, civil society and the state: a case of the Swedish reception.
Since the fall 2024 Oksana Shmulyar Gréen is working within a new VR financed research project, Coming ’home’ in times of uncertainty: Return experiences and constructions of home among Swedish mobile families, (2024-2027). The project team includes Maja Cederberg (leader) and Ylva Wallinder. The research aims to illuminate the motivations, experiences and practices of return among Swedish mobile families.
Networks and Cooperations Oksana is board member for the Nordic Migration Research and for CERGU. She is an associated researcher at CGM (Centre for Global Migration). Since the fall 2015 Shmulyar Gréen coordinates (together with Gabriella Elgenius) MERGU (Migration and Ethnicity Research at Gothenburg University) network for researchers at the Sociology and Work Science Department, whose primary focus are on the issues of families, ethnicity, civil society, law sociology and labour market in the context of migration.
Other international research networks she is engaged in are FORUM (Forced migrants from Ukraine in transnational Europe: Between personal agency, civil society and the state) (2022-ongoing); Hromada ( Nordic-Baltic knowledge-based input network to the rebuilding of Ukraine) (2023- ongoing), Global childhoods (2021-ongoing), Mobile families (2021-ongoing), the Nordic research network on family and personal life, financed by VR (2017-2018), and The Swedish Network for Family and Kinship Studies, financed by Forte (2016-2018), ESA Sociology of Migration.
Teaching and tutoring Transnational families, transnational childhoods, gender and current feminist theories, intersectionlaity and migration, parenting and mobility for work, unaccompanied children and refugee migration, free movement within the EU, welfare and EU’s social dimension, family sociology and significant others, societal development in Ukraine and reception of Ukrainians in Sweden since 2022, qualitative methodology, etc..
Oksana has been reviewing research articles for publications in the scientific journals such as Frontiers in Sociology, Families, Relationships and Societies, Norma, Sociologisk forskning; she has also reviewed books for the Nordic Journal of Migration Research, and Baltic Worlds.
Below see the link to the most current publications.