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”?