This paper examines the pre‐ and post‐Brexit experiences and perspectives of migrants from three “new” European Union (EU) countries—Latvia, Poland, and Slovakia—who are living and working or ...studying in the London area. Deploying the key concepts of power‐geometry and relational space, the analysis explores the way that Brexit impacted the migrants' connections to the U.K. “bounded space” and their ongoing mobility behaviour and plans. Empirical evidence comes from 35 in‐depth interviews with migrants, most of whom were interviewed both before and after the referendum of June 23, 2016. We find that migrants are unequally positioned socio‐spatially to deal with the new power‐geometries resulting from Brexit, and we detect diverging trajectories between the more highly skilled and high‐achieving EU citizens and the more disadvantaged low‐skilled labour migrants. First, we probe the uncertainties brought about by juridical status, related to the length of stay in Britain. Second, we explore personal and professional connections and disruptions. Third, we question how the power‐geometries of time, juridical status, and personal/professional connections/disruptions shape future mobility plans.
Drawing on 32 face-to-face interviews with mothers and childcare providers in Latvia, this paper examines the mundane mobilities. We argue that attention to mundane mobilities reveals crucial ...arrangements of childcare rhythms. Moving to and from childcare places, and around homes with children are central to the provision of childcare. These mobilities are expressed in temporal and personal rhythms, continuities, and disruptions. Mundane mobilities link locations between family and care providers. Childcare mobilities are further shaped by a reduction in the formal supply of childcare in post-socialist Latvia and its replacement by informal arrangements. Through the morally negotiated responsibilities of informal childcare, certain rhythms emerge, including care-time in neighbourhoods, walking and other travel routines, and play activities with children. The paper's theoretical contribution builds on geographical and sociological interpretations of the mobility literature, here with a focus on rhythm analysis applied to childcare in everyday life. Its applied contribution rests on an understanding of how precarity is experienced, and responsibilities negotiated, with a special focus on a post-socialist society.
This paper examines narratives of learning and occupational advancement amongst migrants employed in 'low-skilled' jobs, based on in-depth interviews with secondary-educated East and South Europeans ...living in the London region. Our findings indicate that many achieved varying degrees of professional gratification, progress, and skills development within occupational sectors typically associated with unattractive conditions, limited benefits or opportunities to get ahead. Participants' narratives of achievement expand the relatively limited literature that challenges common perceptions of occupational mobility and professional development as the terrain of the 'highly skilled'. Furthermore, we examine how migrants made sense of their career opportunities and success. We discuss two discourses, centred on 'hard work' and 'creativity' respectively, through which participants challenged and reconfigured traditional 'high'-'low-skilled' divides. Our findings contribute to critiques of traditional understandings of migrant human capital and simplistic 'high'-'low-skilled' distinctions in two ways: by documenting the less visible experiences of learning and career progress amongst secondary-educated European youth who enter 'low-skilled' employment abroad, and by calling attention to subjective understandings of occupational mobility and the new 'symbolic boundaries' around skills, broadly construed, that migrants redrew in their reflections on career progress.
The context of this paper is return visits to the homeland of labour migrants in Europe. The paper draws on data from the author's ethnographic fieldwork on the island of Guernsey and in Latvia ...during 2010-2012. By theorizing the relevance which the research participants attached to the phenomenon of corporeal co-presence in relation to these visits, the paper bridges a timegeographic perspective with phenomenological interpretations. It explains how actual experience during the return path is influenced by both past trajectories and future anticipation. Return visits are conceptualized as spaces of encounter-displacement and illustrated through examples of sensory and emotional experiences of anticipating for the return, the actual travel, time spent in the home area, and departure. The paper suggests that a focus on the body scale can help researchers to gain important insights into how the path is shaped through the corporeal experiences and how it shapes interpretations about home and possible future orientations.
The Eastern European political and para-political responses to the ‘refugee crisis’ demonstrate a schism between the ‘old’ and the ‘new Europe’. Hostile attitudes reveal how unresolved post-imperial ...pasts currently manifest themselves in a seeming inability to show solidarity and empathy for the human suffering of others. To address this question critically, I utilize the notion of ‘independence’ to disentangle the specific neoliberal political mentality that has developed in the Central and Eastern European region, along with a variety of ethno-nationalisms which relive their own past wounds. In countries which have wiped away almost all reminders of their socialist past, solidarity and collectivity are not widely subscribed-to values. Apart from the immediate need to act alongside other European countries and help to accommodate current refugee flows, the Eastern Bloc has a long and necessary journey ahead. This is to negotiate and address their own social and cultural pluralities, which have been deliberately ignored in the rush to join the club of the worlds’ wealthiest democracies in the EU. During this formally accelerated political process, insufficient attention has been paid to social transformations in these new EU countries, including their reluctance to take in and accommodate new migrants and refugees.
Visiting migrants: An introduction Miah, Md Farid; King, Russell; Lulle, Aija
Global networks (Oxford),
January 2023, 2023-01-00, 20230101, Letnik:
23, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
This paper offers an overview of the origins and dynamics of the concept of migrant visits and introduces the key contributions of the special issue. We highlight the significance of visits that ...criss‐cross many forms of migration and centre on these visits’ bilateral and multilateral nature. Furthermore, we emphasize emotional, sensory and bodily implications, which almost always shape encounters between migrants and others in such visits. The papers of this special issue contribute to a broad interdisciplinary agenda highlighting familial ties, networks and transnational spaces at the core of migration and mobility scholarship. Together, we offer new perspectives on the multidirectionality of visits and the role of relationships which drive, connect and diversify forms of migration and are facilitated by broader developments in technology, tourism and diasporic practices.
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.
In this article we investigate what happens to the children who are brought to a new country along with their parents, and how they, now young adults, narrate the ‘self’ as a migrant child and ...adolescent in different temporal and spatial contexts. We draw on five long narrative interviews with young women who were born in Latvia and came to Finland during their childhood. For our analysis of these narratives, we coin a notion of ‘fateful well-being’. The research participants’ challenges as child migrants, where geographical displacement was compounded by language changes and discontinuities in schooling, as well as ruptures with family members and friends, are revalued and appropriated through the self-development skills of reflexive narration. Within the concept of fateful well-being, youth transitions involve both constrained agency and choices towards well-being. We argue that reconciling difficulties is a vital part of fateful well-being.
Youth Mobility and Well-Being Lulle, Aija; King, Russell
Nordic Journal of Migration Research,
06/2019, Letnik:
9, Številka:
2
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
This introductory paper, reflecting the rubric of the special issue, brings together two themes that have recently become prominent in migration research: a focus on youth mobilities, and a concern ...to analyse the process and outcomes of migration through a well-being lens. The five papers that follow approach this intersection in a variety of European contexts and from a plurality of theoretical, methodological and thematic angles. The special issue is a product of the Horizon 2020 YMOBILITY research project on ‘New European Youth Mobilities’, which ran from 2015 to 2018, and most of the papers were first presented at a dedicated session on Youth Mobility and Well-being at the IMISCOE Annual Conference in Rotterdam, 28–30 June 2017.1 The purpose of this editors’ introduction is to ‘map the fields’, which we do by organising our presentation in the following way. In the next section, we open up a discussion on the nature and diversity of youth mobility, looking, in particular, at the way in which young people’s international mobility interfaces with their youth transitions to ‘adulthood’. Then, we review the well-being approach to migration and mobility, with special reference to youth mobilities. The final section of the paper summarises key findings from the five papers that follow.
We bring into dialogue the migrant identities of young Irish immigrants in the UK and young returnees in Ireland. We draw on 38 in‐depth interviews (20 in the UK and 18 in Ireland), aged 20–37 at the ...time of interview, carried out in 2015–16. We argue that “stretching” identities – critical and reflective capabilities to interpret long histories of emigration and the neglected economic dimension – need to be incorporated into conceptualizing “crisis” migrants. Participants draw on networks globally, they choose migration as a temporary “stop‐over” abroad, but they also rework historical Irish migrant identities in a novel way. Becoming an Irish migrant or a returnee today is enacted as a historically grounded capability of mobility. However, structural economic constraints in the Irish labour market need to be seriously considered in understanding return aspirations and realities. These findings generate relevant policy ideas in terms of relations between “crisis” migrants and the state.
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