Paper short abstract:

The presentation will look at both the theoretical and empirical challenges to the concept of the Culture of Migration.

Paper long abstract:

My presentation will be exploring the idea of the Culture of Migration in the context of taints that migration leaves on the migrant in regions where migration might be a practical reality but is by no means a culturally accepted act. I will consider this from both ends: on the one hand, the nationalist states of Eastern Europe, Estonia in particular, have been hostile to in-migration, which has rubbed off on migration more generally. This is in a strange contradiction with the politicoeconomic reality of neoliberalism that Estonians have supposedly accepted wholeheartedly since early 1990s, a discrepancy further complicated by the success story that Estonia is told to have been amongst the post-socialist states, and the status of rural regions from which migration has been the greatest. On the other hand, the destination countries provide a further taint that migrants, especially from Eastern Europe, have to face.

I will be considering these moral and cultural minefields that migrants face through data from my fieldwork in Estonian rural regions on the one hand, and amongst migrants in the UK on the other. Leaving behind even the most hopeless of environment triggers many moral challenges which need to be included if using the concept of Culture of Migration.