Are we all Migrants? Masterclass with Highschool Students and Prisma Ukraїna
By Marko Duric and Diana Rubezhanska
On Wednesday, 30 April 2025, students of Walther-Rathenau-Gymnasium visited the Forum Transregionale Studien for the second time for a workshop on the topic of displacement in the context of Russia’s War against Ukraine. In the Displacement Masterclass, conducted by Prisma Ukraїna Fellows Viktoriya Sereda and Lidia Kuzemska, the students learned about the Forum Transregionale Studien’s Prisma Ukraїna: War, Migration and Memory project, an interdisciplinary research group of Ukrainian scholars in Ukraine and Germany that has been constituted in 2022 under the direction of Viktoriya Sereda. The research group offers a multi-scalar perspective on the transformational effects of war and dislocation on people’s memory, history, and sense of belonging. Since 2016, the Forum cooperates with the nearby Walther-Rathenau-Gymnasium and arranges encounters of students and Fellows on issues of common concern.
The goal of this workshop was to give the students an insight into the practical work of a transregional research institute, to show what politics, history and geography lessons are good for in practice, and to let them explore the topics of migration and displacement.
Since summer 2022, Ukrainian scholars with different disciplinary backgrounds work together in the research group War, Migration and Memory. The Prisma Ukraїna project has established a working group that connects scholars from different locations, crossing physical borders through collaborative digital working spaces and other formats and facilitating knowledge exchange between German and Ukrainian academia and society. One of the unexpected project effects was that all the scholars, irrespective of their disciplinary approach, felt that it is important to document and record the experiences of their compatriots and the societal transformation processes in relation to the war. As a result, a big archive of survey data and interviews with displaced Ukrainians in Germany, Poland and Ukraine has been created.

How many people in the world are migrants?
The workshop started with an introduction to the study field of migration and personal stories shared by workshop leaders Viktoriya Sereda and Lidia Kuzemska. How many people in the world are actually migrants? ‒ was the kick-off questions for students in the first part of the workshop. The students’ guesses and the actual numbers differed quite a bit. According to statistical data, 3.6% of the world’s population, 281 million people, are migrants. Interestingly, the students of Walther-Rathenau-Gymnasium expected the number to be much higher. “We were a little surprised, as we would have guessed a higher number, but upon further reflection, this number makes sense“, says student Marko Duric. One reason for this relatively low percentage is that the majority of migrants actually migrate within their own countries, and not abroad, as many of the students thought. The first part of the workshop was wrapped up by three core questions: Which country has the largest proportion of immigrants in its population? Which country has the smallest proportion of immigrants in its population? How have these amounts changed in the past 30 years?
The students were given a QR-code in order to find the correct answers themselves. Currently states like the United States of America, Saudi Arabia, England and Germany have the highest amount of migrants compared to their population. The countries with the lowest proportion of migrants in their population are Greenland, Western Sahara, and Cuba. By studying a pie chart of transregional migrant flows the students came to the conclusion that most people do not leave their continents. As Lidia Kuzemska and Viktoriya Sereda confirmed, most people who migrate tend to stay closer to their home countries rather than migrating somewhere far away. At the end of the first part of the workshop, the group had a closer look on forced migration. In the following open discussion, the students were given the possibility to reflect about the reasons for forced migration, which affects 117 million people in these days.
In the second part of the workshop, the focus shifted to the topic of Ukrainian migration. In order to understand where Ukrainians have been migrating to since the full-scale invasion by Russia, Lidia Kuzemska and Viktoriya Sereda presented an interactive map showing the Facebook activity from Ukrainian-speaking users in Europe and their locations. The comparison of certain Google Search Trends has also been proven to be a useful tool to explore what migration also means in a social sense. For example, in which parts of Ukraine the term “evacuation“ was most frequently searched in Google after the invasion? This term was searched frequently in pretty much all over Ukraine. After being already displaced from their home country, Ukrainians most frequently searched for terms such as “work“ and “school“ as Google Data proves for Germany, Poland and the Czech Republic.
“Our aim with Viktoriya Sereda during this workshop was threefold“, said Lidia Kuzemska.
First, to discuss with the students current global migration trends and test their assumptions about the reasons of internal and international migration. Second, we wanted to give them an opportunity to do short exercises, one using statistical data on the distribution of migrants globally and in Germany, and the other one on the portrayal of migrants in their favourite social media (TikTok, Instagram, YouTube). Finally, we hoped that this workshop will help students be more critical and knowledgeable when they encounter widespread myths about migration and migrants.
Translated by Mandy Kinzel.
Citation: Marko Duric and Diana Rubezhanska, Are we all Migrants? Masterclass with Highschool Students and Prisma Ukraїna, in: TRAFO – Blog for Transregional Research, 26.06.2025, https://trafo.hypotheses.org/59788
OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Forum Transregionale Studien (June 26, 2025). Are we all Migrants? Masterclass with Highschool Students and Prisma Ukraїna. TRAFO – Blog for Transregional Research. Retrieved July 8, 2025 from https://doi.org/10.58079/147r7