Paper short abstract:

This paper engages with the intergenerational legacy of the Russian emigration to Sweden in the 1920s. The focus of the article lies in postmemories, that is, in how fragmentary memories of emigration still affect the lives and identities of their descendants three generations later.

Paper long abstract:

This paper focuses on the afterlife of the Russian’s emigration to Sweden three generations later. The Russian refugees who fled to Sweden in the 1920s after the Russian revolutions tried to blend into the background. They did not organize themselves to the same extent as the Russian cultural elite who emigrated to Paris or Berlin and their experiences seem forgotten forever. But what is left of their experiences within their family circles?

This paper engages with Russian emigrants’ intergenerational legacies through a narrative-analytical approach. By interviewing grandchildren of Russian refugees from the 1920s (now 60-year-old adults!), the paper investigates the meaning attributed to emigration three generations later. Are grandchildren affected by the emigration of their grandparents? What place does their Russian background have in their current life? What remains of the experience of exile three generations later? What anecdotes do they remember? What non-textual practices, such as gestures, traditions do they carry with them?

The focus of the article thus lies in postmemories, that is, in the fragmentary memories of the third generation. Although Russian refugees kept quiet about their past, the Russian intangible heritage was transferred in one way or another to their next of kin. The article aims to analyze how the Russian past still shapes the lives and identities of their descendants.

Paper short abstract:

The paper focuses on mobilities and memory work of Sweden-based persons with Ingrian Finnish backgrounds. By examining archived materials and autobiographical literature, I aim to explore personal and cultural remembrance related to Ingrian Finns’ transnational history.

Paper long abstract:

Ingrian Finns are a centuries-old Finnish-speaking minority of Russia and the Soviet Union; they used to live in the historical province of Ingria, located along the southern and eastern coast of the Gulf of Finland. From the late 1920s onwards, Ingrian Finns, along with many other ethnic minorities in the Soviet Union, experienced various forms of repression. Tens of thousands were deported to other parts of the country, imprisoned, or executed. During the Second World War, Ingrian Finns living in the areas occupied by German troops were displaced to Finland, and several thousand of them eventually moved to Sweden, often out of fear of forced repatriation to the Soviet Union.

This presentation focuses on transnational mobilities, identities, and memory work of Sweden-based persons with Ingrian Finnish backgrounds. By examining oral history interviews with Ingrian Finnish migrants and their descendants, archived materials of Sweden’s Ingrian Finnish associations, and autobiographical literature, I aim to explore personal and cultural remembrance and mnemonic practices related to Ingrian Finns’ transnational history.

Paper short abstract:

The present paper seeks to approach (re) produced patterns of privilege and cumulative advantage, aka Matthew Effect or the rich-get-richer principle, as exemplified by the Russian-speaking subcommunities in Vienna.

Paper long abstract:

In 1968 sociologist Robert Merton published an article titled ''The Matthew Effect in Science'' in which he applied the biblical passage after St. Matthew for addressing particular сonsistency in which “unknown scientists are unjustifiably victimized and famous ones, unjustifiably benefited”. Later on, this rich-get-richer principle, dubbed as Matthew Effekt, was instrumentalized for explaining power asymmetries, as well as the role played by structure in nurturing multivarious patterns of privilege coming out, i.a., in “right” citizenship, class, ethnicity, or occupation (Croucher 2009). In a similar vein, I argue that the principle of cumulative advantage would be productive to research on privileged mobility, expressed in “freedom and choice to relocate”, and respective lifestyle characteristics of its agents. Unlike other forms of migration, which pathologize, stigmatize, or marginalize the whole practice of relocation, privileged mobility is “marked by power” (Benson, and O’Reilly 2009a; Harper, and Knowles 2009) enabling such migrants to maintain de-territorialized supranational status by creating economic and cultural autonomy from the host society and structuring a convenient model of their integration. To illustrate how the Matthew effect operates at the level of (re) produced patterns of privilege, I will draw on my ethnographic fieldwork in Vienna (Austria) where I engage with Russian-speaking nest doll “subcommunities” (Kopnina 2016), each of which is distinguished through the inclusive “systems of disposition” (Bourdieu 1984) shared across lifestyle practices in the host context.

Paper short abstract:

The paper reflects on the complexity of (im)mobility and (re)migration, through the lens of Bosnian Roma refugees living in a state-run ghetto in Rome (Italy), who invest in the construction/refurbishing of houses in Bosnia without actual plans of returning to the lost homeland.

Paper long abstract:

This paper reflects on materials collected during ongoing research among Bosnian Roma refugees living in a state-run ghetto at the periphery of Rome (Italy). Despite housing segregation and diffused anti-Gypsy and xenophobic sentiments in Italian society, the families here described got rooted in the social, economic, and cultural texture of the Eternal City, where they have been living for 3 decades. These families nonetheless remain nostalgically attached to Bosnia, homeland which they forcedly left and which the war, international agreements and the transition to neoliberal economy wiped away. In the last 15 years, after regularizing their position in Italy, many Roma started building or refurbishing houses in Bosnia. These houses, situated in the surroundings of Tuzla (Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina), are regularly visited, especially in summer. Although rapidly spreading in the community, the new transnational practices revolving around houses do not foster fantasies of re-migration. Tuzla is not the Roma’s lost home-village – now situated in the Serbian Republic – and definitive returns to Bosnia are commonly connected to the failure of the migratory project in Western EU, or to death (as the bodies of deceased Roma are still buried in the home-village). This paper explores the ambivalence and complexity of practices and imageries of (im)mobility which stretch between EU and non-EU spaces, which reveal complex scenarios of (re)migration, and articulate alternative understandings and practices of European identity.