Eastern European migrants’ affective relationship with the idea of working class remains poorly understood. This article demonstrates how neoliberal ideology – which shaped postsocialist change – ...produces certain affective class processes among Central and Eastern European migrants. Migrants often do not share class ramifications in Latvia or the UK but divert their felt class towards the notion of a better life. The article challenges the ‘East’ and ‘West’ dichotomy found in much contemporary class analysis by examining specific spatiotemporal relations, transformations and subjectivities. The qualitative data derive from my long-term (2010–2018) engagement with Latvian migrants in the UK. I offer nuanced insights into labour migrants’ affective class subjectivities at the bodily scale, spatial scale and temporal scale. This framework helps us understand how class subjectivities shape individuals and societies in Eastern Europe and beyond.
This article contends that envisioning the future of housing planning in post-socialist cities necessitates the acknowledgment of a pressing reality: Many societies are undergoing rapid aging and ...depopulation. Latvia’s capital city of Riga, the focal point of this study, stands at the forefront of these global trends. However, due to entrenched neoliberal practices that idealize youthful, robust, and entrepreneurial residents, considerations of aging are conspicuously absent from urban planning visions. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted in the capital city between 2021 and 2023, this article establishes a link between urban lived experiences while aging and the intersecting dynamics of housing. The critical analysis is informed by data derived from observations, conversations, media sources, official discourses, and perspectives gathered through expert interviews. Ultimately, this article advances an agenda aimed at urging people to think about more hopeful futures for aging in cities, an issue of paramount significance in the post-socialist societies of the 21st century.
There is a paradox: While life courses are de facto pluralising, the pull to conform to an imagined standard is strong. In this thematic issue, we unpack the question: To whose standards do people ...cohere over the course of their lives? We seek the answers through the idea of life course justice, by which we mean a critical inquiry into how wealth, opportunities, and privilege are distributed and constrained in certain life stages and situations, and geographically. The dual focus of this thematic issue is thus on how people forge new ways to learn and work and how they try to resolve life course differences.
Discussions on migration and development geography have both suffered from ‘ageism’: an overwhelming preoccupation with children and the young in the latter and widespread assumptions that migrants ...are generally young adults, who only leave behind children in the former. It is unsurprising, then, that migration-development debates have also been biased in favour of the young. In this paper we consider the place of older people and of ageing as a process in migration and development debates. We argue that older people, thus far overlooked, are also involved in migration and development, in heterogeneous ways and in different geographical contexts. While doing this, we challenge the conventional view of older migrants as inactive and vulnerable and of older people as merely recipients of development interventions. We argue that experiences of ageing and global inequalities are increasingly entwined and demonstrate this through five dimensions of migration and development debates: remittances, diasporas, return migration, international retirement migration, and intergenerational care. Older people and ageing as a process are central to each one of these dimensions, and it is imperative to pave further research of heterogeneity of ageing within contexts of global inequality. (189 words)
Celotno besedilo
Dostopno za:
DOBA, IZUM, KILJ, NUK, OILJ, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, SIK, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
This paper examines recent migration from three little-studied European Union (EU) countries, the Baltic states, focusing on early-career graduates who move to London. It looks at how these young ...migrants explain the reasons for their move, their work and living experiences in London, and their plans for the future, based on 78 interviews with individual migrants. A key objective of this paper is to rejuvenate the core–periphery structural framework through the theoretical lens of London as an ‘escalator’ region for career development. We add a necessary nuance on how the time dimension is crucial in understanding how an escalator region functions – both in terms of macro-events such as EU enlargement or economic crisis, and for life-course events such as career advancement or family formation. Our findings indicate that these educated young adults from the EU’s north-eastern periphery migrate for a combination of economic, career, lifestyle and personal-development reasons. They are ambivalent about their futures and when, and whether, they will return-migrate.
In this paper I investigate how an international border is ‘revitalised’ in political discourses as opposed to lived experiences. Based on narratives I have collected from border dwellers on both ...sides of the current border between Latvia and Russia and placing them into a broader context of current border debates, I analyse how geographical and social mobility is remembered from Soviet times and reworked in current contexts. I argue that while politically the border is revitalised through abandoning and forgetting the Soviet past and through the idea of constant threats in the future, locally it is revitalised through giving a life to the abandoned: memories of ‘vigorous times’ in life-courses and material things. People who dwell at the border did not move themselves: the international border moved several times in one century leaving border dwellers’ memories and significant places on the ‘other’ side. I focus on how these borders were crossed in the past, how they are (not) crossed now, and the social meanings assigned to these circumstances. In the current context I follow diverse paths of reasoning that describe how the uneven flow of goods and people through the Latvian-Russian border shapes the power dynamic against which the people living in the border area used to reconstruct imaginaries of ‘Soviet times’ versus ‘Europe’ and ‘vigorous times’ versus decline.
This paper proposes to rethink the agriculture–migration nexus through the notions of temporal fix and migrant hierarchies. Its empirical setting is the post-socialist migration of Latvians who move ...to the Channel Island of Guernsey and to Norway, where they take temporary jobs picking crops such as tomatoes and strawberries. I analyse both how agricultural migrants are viewed by others and how they evaluate themselves. The research material comes from long-term ethnographic engagement with Latvian migrants in these two destinations. In both geographical contexts, temporary agricultural work positions migrants at the bottom of the labour hierarchy. Yet, because of their experience of agriculture in the homeland in Soviet and early post-Soviet times, and because being close to nature is part of Latvian cultural identity, such work is viewed as fundamental and positive. Experiences abroad are nevertheless ‘shocking’ because of the tough work under strict capitalist regulations. Yet the work is endured either as a step to a better job abroad, or as a means of accumulating income for a better life upon return ‘home’.
•The notion of ‘temporal fix’ helps to understand how the ‘value’ of working in agriculture was interpreted by migrants.•In post-Soviet times temporal relocation abroad maximised monetary gain of hourly wages.•Many participants disassociated themselves from being lowest-hierarchy agricultural migrant workers.•Certain types of worker were preferred; those who do not remain as permanent immigrants but go back after a ‘temporal fix’.
Abstract This paper explores a new perspective on middle‐aged migrant women. Midlife has long been presumed to be the most networked stage of life for sedentary populations, but it has not been ...examined critically in the context of migration. This is an empty space that warrants research attention, because middle‐aged migrants often have lives that are temporally and spatially distinctive. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Latvia and the United Kingdom (2018–2023), I argue that the lifecourses of middle‐aged migrant women resemble the transitions that young people go through for work but differ in terms of care. Although strong ties relatives and friends have long been thought to be key for transnational care relations, weak ties also become instrumental through shared notions of self‐actualization in midlife. I provide a novel understanding of how the concepts of linked lives and networks can be applied to processes that are pertinent to middle‐aged women.
This paper examines how, when and where personal names are produced as 'migrant names'. Drawing on 21 interviews with young Irish and Latvian migrants in the UK, I demonstrate how mundane stories, ...linguistic details, and repertoires about migrant names are embodied, mobile, relational, and produce everyday social distinctions. Empirical analysis unpacks changes in naming stories throughout participants' multiple migration trajectories in Ireland, Latvia, the UK and beyond. I argue for a geographically sensitive take on migrant names because they are produced as such through recognisable repertoires of displacement and then re-emplaced in certain spaces and times. The paper makes three main original contributions. The first is to interdisciplinary literatures on names, specifically on the significance of temporal and spatial contexts and the relationalities underpinning the production of migrant names. Second, it brings to geographies of identities novel understandings of ethnic and national power relations in naming practices, including an emphasis on the process of ambiguous whiteness. Finally, I contribute much-needed methodological propositions on how to pseudonymise names in migration research.
Celotno besedilo
Dostopno za:
BFBNIB, DOBA, IZUM, KILJ, NUK, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
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