Click the star to add/remove an item to/from your individual schedule.
You need to be logged in to avail of this functionality.
Log in
- Convenor:
-
Winnie Lem
(Trent University)
Send message to Convenor
- Chair:
-
Masha Shaw
(University of Aberdeen)
- Formats:
- Workshops
- Location:
- Rowan Room 2
- Start time:
- 27 August, 2010 at
Time zone: Europe/London
- Session slots:
- 2
Long Abstract:
This workshop is a comparative examination of the experiences of dislocation problematized through migrant memories, media and politics. Through the theoretical and methodological orientations of biographical research, rights of passage, cultural analysis and political economy, the papers address questions of belonging, integration, adaptation and also the regulation of migrants, whose circulation through distinctive routes and locations is conditioned by social and political conflict as well as economic crises. The papers confront the nature of migrant politics, as well as how migrants re-appropriate memory to shape history. They also contribute toward illuminating the relationship between migrants and the forms of governance that prevail in the societies of origin and relocation. Overall, the papers engage in an examination and analysis of the quotidian complexities and concerns of people whose lives are distinguished by mobility. Cases studies are presented of national and transnational migration across Europe, Asia and Africa.
Accepted papers:
Session 1Paper long abstract:
During 1946-49 as the result of the Greek civil war, more than 3,000 Greek children (5-12 years of age) were sent to orphanages, surrogate-care and educational institutions in Poland. For different reasons a number of them have decided to stay in Poland permanently. In my paper I will present findings about this institutional migration at which I have arrived through biographic research. I will pay special attention to the disciplining and surveillance character of the external (and internal) control of the Greek diaspora in Poland maintained by the Polish State through special institutions as it is presented in the narratives of Greek child-refugees. I will examine the categories I have determined in the process of interpreting the biographical interviews that I have collected during my fieldwork and I will try to answer questions concerning the problem of Greek migrants and their adaptation to life in Communist Poland.
Paper short abstract:
We are not using the short abstract this year.
Paper long abstract:
This paper provides a specific "Northern" perspective on lifestyle migration. The case considered here is the village of Kuzomen' at the White Sea coast, near the Polar Circle. While the 1960s saw high migration of villagers to the city, population of Kuzomen' today doubles in summer as many of those who had migrated to city now seasonally return to their rural homeland. They do so partly because they can no longer afford travelling to resorts in the South, and partly because they pursue a particular lifestyle. There are tensions between summer visitors and permanent residents. The latter think they preserved the village despite all economic and social difficulties, whereas the former assume that permanent residents have caused the village to decline. The controversy can be traced in people's attitudes to the built environment and to historical and genealogical data. The paper unpacks the reasons behind the divergence of these views.
Paper long abstract:
This paper explores the ‘right to participate in the work of the imagination’, in the Appadurai’s sense, of the posted workers as immigrants coming from outside the EU. The fieldwork undertaken in Romania allowed for a surprise resulted from the large number of posted workers compared to the immigrant workers employed. I tried to find the reasons accounting for using the relocation of workers (posting of work) instead of their employment. For only one year of work abroad, posted workers have to build a new life and follow the circularity of “workplace-household link where practices are deterritorialised” (Sassen). The analysis of the status of posted workers, in the case of Romania, shows that this type of mobility needs a ‘locality’ to live in, somehow produced and reproduced as a “structure of feeling”. Having in mind “imagination as a social practice” what kind of politics could recognize “the right to participate in the work of the imagination”?
Paper short abstract:
Paper long abstract:
I shall argue here that concepts of Creoleness are used both to formulate an ethics of modern time and mobility, and to form social realities whose experience, among others through tourism, brings this very ethics alive. Creoleness presents itself as a powerful allegory to think about time in terms of a linear process, as 'history' emanating in an imaginary point of origin, and leading towards a state of increasing melange and 'creolisation'. Through a historical and ethnographic study in the Indian Ocean island of La Reunion, I will show how the island and islanders were made to inhabit and ultimately to perform this allegory as a means to participate in a global modernity. Through the particular focus on a recent museum project, the article will point to the ambivalences underlying this new sign-economy within which facets of the islanders' everyday life are elevated as to be or become a 'model for the world'.