Depicting refugees as a threat to the nation, the Orbán government turned the 2015 refugee crisis into populist propaganda (Cantat&Rajaram, 2019). As part of a broader set of anti-refugee politics and policies, earlier intercultural education programs were dismantled, resources – including financial and symbolic support for local innovations and NGOs focusing on refugee education, for Hungarian language teaching, and the per capita financing for teaching non-Hungarian speakers – were withdrawn. Consequently, families entering Hungary after the breakout of Russia’s war on Ukraine faced an education system unprepared for welcoming displaced children (Ercse, 2023).

In the context of the Hungarian state’s ambiguous political communication and “organized non-responsibility” (Pries, 2019: 6), a handful of civil society and grassroots actors immediately started to provide education and childcare for Ukrainian families. My presentation focuses on interviews with representatives of “grassroots humanitarianism” (Vandevoordt & Fleischmann 2020) or “citizen aid” (Fechter and Schwittay 2019) as well as organized NGOs offering educational support and childcare for Ukrainian families. The discussion concentrates on how the problem of time and the social imaginaries of hope and uncertainty featured in the helpers’ narratives and shaped their actions. These initiatives are examples of experimental humanitarism (Thieme et al. 2020; Ramakrishnan and Thieme, 2022): solidarity work entailed constant problem-solving, yet it has not proved to be ephemeral, but so far has survived growing public disinterest.

Drawing on recent studies on the temporalities of humanitarian action (Brun 2016; Vandervoodt and Felischmann, 2020), I explore how solidarity education initiatives navigate different temporalities. Humanitarian actions responding to crises are often thought to be governed by the ‘imaginary of emergency’ and captured by the present. Critical voices argued that their preoccupation with alleviating suffering in the here and now tends to de-contextualise suffering from its long-term causes and solutions (Calhoun 2008) and depoliticize these initiatives (Braun, 2017). But equally influentially, similarly to social movements, volunteers’ imaginaries are inspired by an ideal vision of future society (Fournier 2002), and some of them deeply engage with the structural political causes of the events.

Regarding the here and now, most interlocutors conceptualized their educational services as a means of unmaking uncertainty through providing structure and safety that aims to counterweight the chaos of the war. They often emphasized that the primary objective – one related to the present – of their initiatives is to establish a safe space where the children can experience empathy and compassion.

Education is profoundly driven by the social imaginaries of the future (Facer, 2023). I will bring examples of grassroots education initiatives, typically organized by members of the host society, who understood their solidarity work as prefigurative politics (Swain, 2019), a means of modeling change for the host society. Our interlocutors viewed education as a vehicle for a transformative and ethopoietic pedagogy (Collet-Sabé&Ball), which can foster social change through the practice of the relational ethics of care. Zembylas (2020) suggests that in the context of populist politics and exclusive forms of nationalism, democratic education should be a practice of affective counter-politics, developed at the micro-level of pedagogical encounters. These solidarity initiatives can be understood as affective counter-politics driven by visions of enacting alternative modes of togetherness and “politics by other means” (Kirsch, 2016) in the context of exclusivist populist politics.

Another type of engaging with the future was primarily enacted by Ukrainian-led initiatives. Making alliances with international and non-state partners (donors and host schools providing their infrastructures), and positioning themselves in a transnational space of education, these interlocutors talked about universalistic educational objectives (sustainability, climate education) and aimed to educate transnational citizens.

Our team has been researching the patterns of Hungarian solidarity mobilization in crisis situations since the 2015 refugee crisis. Between June 2022 and January 2023, we conducted 28 semi-structured interviews and ethnographic observations in local communities and observed in-person and online conferences to explore bottom-up solidarity mobilizations emerging in response to the influx of Ukrainian displaced people. The data collection was complemented by the ongoing analysis of the media representation and social media activity of the studied initiatives. The semi-structured interviews concentrated on the themes of (1) the organization of solidarity and community problem-solving; (2) discourses and relations of deservingness and responsibility regarding the helping actions and in the broader societal context; (3) the public impact of solidarity initiatives and the political aspects of community support; (4) the motivational narratives of the solidarians including the economic, emotional and ideological aspects of the work of solidarity. This presentation is based on 12 semi-structured interviews conducted with representatives of solidarity initiatives offering education support, childcare services, and material support for children. The interviews were transcribed, thematically coded, and analyzed. The current analysis moves beyond the strictly understood thematic analysis of the empirical material and looks into how the interlocutors thematize the problem of temporality and how the social imaginaries of present and future unfold in the interviews in relation to education and solidarity.

The presentation aims to contribute to the conversation in the network about the Social imaginaries of the future: the making and unmaking of certainty in education. The heart of the talk is dedicated to conceptualizing informal education spaces as forms of affective counter-politics in the context of thriving political populism and nationalism. With a long-term populist authoritarian government, Hungary is a key scene to study the social impact of populist politics and the emergence of affective counter-politics. Nevertheless, the case has wider implications across Europe and European education given the growing strength, political and policy influence of populist movements and ideologies.

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