Suchergebnisse

AbstractWe 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.

Young, tertiary-educated emigrants see themselves, and are seen by their home country's government, as agents of economic and social change, especially if they can be incentivized to return home. In this paper we examine the barriers that prevent this positive impact from being fully realized, taking the case of Latvia, formerly part of the Soviet Union but since 2004 a member state of the European Union. We build our analysis on data from an online questionnaire (N = 307) and from narrative interviews (N = 30) with foreign-educated Latvian students and graduates. In moving beyond remittances, we examine knowledge transfer to the home country as a form of "social remittance" and break down knowledge into two types—that which can be transferred fully and that which can be transferred only partially. We find that students and graduates do indeed see themselves as agents of change in their home country, but that the changes they want to make, and the broader imaginaries of development that they may have, are constrained by the limited scale of the market, ethnic privileging of "Latvianness," and the often nontransparent recruitment practices in Latvia. Policy should recognize and respond to various barriers that exist to knowledge transfer and return migration.

AbstractThis 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.

This paper is closed access until 27th September 2020. ; 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.

This collection explores mobile childhoods: from Latvia and Estonia to Finland; from Latvia to the United Kingdom; from Russia to Finland; and cyclical mobility by the Roma between Romania and Finland. The chapters examine how east-to-north European family mobility brings out different kinds of multilocal childhoods. The children experience unequal starting points and further twists throughout their childhood and within their family lives. Through the innovative use of ethnographic and participatory methods, the contributors demonstrate how diverse migrant children's everyday lives are, and how children themselves as well as their translocal families actively pursue better lives. The topics include naming and food practices, travel, schooling, summer holidays, economic and other inequalities, and the importance of age in understanding children's lives. Translocal Childhoods and Family Mobility in East and North Europe will be of interest to students and scholars across a range of disciplines, including sociology, anthropology and human geography.

This paper visualises tertiary-level students who study abroad as simultaneously both international students and members of an emerging diaspora. Coming from a country (Latvia) which is small, peripheral and relatively poor by European standards, students go abroad for multiple reasons not necessarily directly connected with study (eg. family reasons, labour migration); yet their evolving diasporic status is instrumentalised by the Latvian government which wants them to return and contribute to the country's development. Based on 27 in-depth interviews with Latvian students and graduates who have studied abroad, our analysis focuses on three interlinked dimensions of inequality: access to education at home and abroad; the varying prestige of higher education qualifications from different countries and universities; and the inequalities involved in getting recognition of the symbolic and cultural capital that derives from a non-Latvian university. Within a setting of neoliberal globalisation and conflicting messages from the homeland, students and graduates are faced with a challenging dilemma: how to balance their materialistic desire for a decent job and career with their patriotic duty to return to Latvia.

Borders of desire takes a novel approach to the study of borders: rather than seeing them only as obstacles to the fulfillment of human desires, this collection focuses on how borders can also be productive of desire. Based on long-term ethnographic engagement with sites along the eastern borders of Europe, particularly in the Baltics and the Balkans, the studies in this volume illuminate how gendered and sexualized desires are generated by the existence of borders and how they are imagined. As the chapters show, borders can create new desires expressed as aspirations, resentments, and actions including physical movements across borders for pleasure or work, or collective enactments of political ideals or resistance. The collection also shows how the persistent east/west symbolic border continues to act as a source of these desires in European political and social life