Paper short abstract:

The paper discusses the dramatic change in life-possibilities, hopes and futures from Soviet times to today among Soviet-era Russian speakers in Narva (Estonia) by approaching their relationship to Narva as a home and focusing on the intersection of locality, state and hope in home-discourses.

Paper long abstract:

The life of Russian speakers who came to Estonian-Russian border town Narva during the Soviet times, can be epitomized in their narratives as a shift from 'paradise' to struggle in the 'God's forgotten town'. The paper seeks to explain this transformation in life perspectives by approaching Narvans' relationship to Narva as a home-place and focusing on the intersection of locality, state and the element of hope in home-discourses. Empirically, the paper relies on ethnographic study undertaken in 2010-2011 in Narva among Russian speakers who moved to Soviet Narva after 1944 through various migration trajectories and became subjects of the Estonian state after the Soviet collapse. Those Narvans, instead of seeing themselves as active protagonists in their life-narratives connected to Narva, often picture themselves and their home-town as victims of larger national and global processes in which states, supranational organisations and other people play a leading role. While the relationship with Estonian state is tensed, Soviet Narva and accordingly Soviet state appear in retrospect in exceptionally positive tones - full of hope and possibilities for life improvement. I argue that the significant difference between the Estonian vs. Soviet state is not only a nostalgic longing for the lost, but an everyday life experience that has dramatically changed and diminished their life possibilities. Yet depicting their futures in Narva only in terms of hopelessness would be misleading since the landscapes of possibility are increasingly shifted away from Narva and reshaped through the mobile experience in the European West - through their children and grandchildren.

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the trajectories of young men in Turkey from modest backgrounds whose aspirations for exciting, cosmopolitan, and mobile livestyles inspire them to try to transgress or circumvent social and state structures of manhood, with mixed results. Two case studies will be compared.

Paper long abstract:

The path to manhood in Turkey unites social and state conventions; mobility is an intertwined phenomenon. Men-in-the-making have historically been encouraged to experiment with movement across the physical and social borders of the wider world as a means of cultivating ideal manhood. The Turkish state has also embedded onto this path its own rite of passage in the form of conscription. Charged with the production of men, the 'capillaries' (Foucault 1978) of state power and what Leyla Neyzi calls the 'channels' (2001) of social production are structurally consolidated, functioning seamlessly as doxa (Bourdieu 1977).

This model presumes an eventual return to one's home town and a re-integration into normative sociability. So what does this mean for those who aspire to 'masculine trajectories' (Ghannam 2013) that are not circular and cyclical? That is, under what conditions may those who imagine their personal trajectories as continuing 'to the outside' (dışarıya) also be thought of as men? The schism between their 'cosmopolitan subjectivities' and the structures of manhood reframes mobility as not only desire but necessity, with a change of context bringing the only chance to enact manhood on their own terms.

This paper outlines the creative and often morally ambiguous strategies such young men employ to transgress or circumvent the social and state structures they perceive as obstacles to self-determination, including the restrictive visa regulations placed on Turkish citizens for travel abroad. These strategies and their consequences are explored through a comparison of two divergent cases.

Paper short abstract:

How do people enact mobile lives? In Cairo educated unemployed young men construct an imaginative sense of possibility through inhabiting hopeful visions and meritocratic discourses promising the good life, discourses which, cruelly, legitimate the structural forms of inequality which have marginalized them

Paper long abstract:

How do people attempt to enact mobile lives in locations where movement is perpetually inhibited? This paper explores the practices through which educated unemployed young men in Cairo construct an imaginative sense of possibility in a context where they face expulsion from aspirational modes of middle-class living. By latching on to accessible visions, symbols, and spaces of the good life, they endeavour to shift their consciousness away from a frustrating daily reality into the imagined future, towards an anticipated moment of fulfilment (of their desires for consumption, for love, and for employment). Moral value is gained in the present through an ability to 'struggle' for respectable living. This endeavour, however, is threatened by constant reminders of existing immobility.

Articulating mobility requires investment in various knowledge frameworks that offer up the promise of future satisfaction (such as religious divination, self-help, and meritocracy). This 'promise', more and more, is portrayed as contingent upon the moral, cultural, and socio-economic behaviour of the autonomous individual. This portrayal provides these immobile young men with an imaginary blueprint for future mobility, a source of hope and power in uncertain times. However, in a context in which little ever works out the way it is hoped, such optimism garnered from these systems of knowledge becomes cruel, and eternally unrealisable. These young men come to place the responsibility for success or failure upon themselves, and therefore sustain a meritocratic principle that keeps the focus away from the reproductive forms of inequality which continue to ensure their marginality.

Paper short abstract:

This article explores the return mobility of Burmese migrants and its intersection with different forms of power. The imaginative horizons of the Burmese return and the usage of entrepreneurial skills are significantly constituted by diverse socio-political powers, under the continuing reform in Myanmar.

Paper long abstract:

This article explores the return mobility of Burmese migrants and its intersection with different forms of power. Recently, some Burmese returnees, from various ethnic origins, have gone into small-scaled business, discovering the unnoticed economic opportunity. The imaginative horizons towards return and business project are not simply driven by individual calculation, but rather structured by intersecting powers. The political reform since 2011 has increasingly improved civil rights and freedom, providing guarantee of everyday-life safety. Family ties and kinship also oblige many migrants to think about homecoming and eventually rejoin their country of origin. However, the Burmese and ethnic-based militants remain an intimidating obstacle. The situation creates deep anxiety among returnees, as those political influences can hinder or even damage the possibility of earning and having a good life. While most returnees distance themselves from troubles, some new entrepreneurs submit to these authorities, working with them and benefiting from smuggling business. This ethnographic writing is based on fieldwork in business-booming areas of southeastern Myanmar, adjacent to the Thailand-Myanmar border. The paper argues that the politics of return mobility is significantly constituted by diverse socio-political powers under the continuing reform in Myanmar. This return trajectory is not just about going back home, but an on-going mobility through possibilities and dealing with limitations.

Paper short abstract:

How do citizen-subjects of the Kurdistan Region of Iraq (KRI) manage problems of identity and mobility in a religiously and ethnically diverse territory during this time of threat to the region from the Islamic State?

Paper long abstract:

This paper focuses on the powers and mobilities that intersect at a Christian private school in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq. I examine how genealogies of the "self" inform the identity-transformation projects of people embedded in patrilineages, confessional groups, education programs, and the Kurdistani quasi-state. The school is a productive site for examining how physical, ideological, or moral displacements variously constrain and enable people to envision a good life. Many of the school's staff, teachers, and students are "in transit," whether as internally displaced people, as returnees from the Kurdish diaspora, or as potential emigrants. Additionally, the school, which uses a model of "liberal" education encouraging critical thinking and self-reflection, offers a space where some ideological and moral transformations, or "conversions," are possible. I use an expanded concept of "conversion" encompassing religious, ethnic, or political attachments. In Iraq, and in the Kurdistan Region also, the state, confessional groups, and families tightly regulate identity based on patrilineal kinship, in which a person at birth inherits the religious and ethnic identity of his or her father and is then expected by state and society alike to remain in that inherited ethnosectarian category for life. The private school, however, is an exceptional space in which people whose lives are otherwise characterized by stasis or displacement can experiment with mobilities and become emplaced in new regimes of power and moral visions.