Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the working of a transnational labour network from Northern Hungary by shedding light on the role of informal recruiters, migration intermediaries in facilitating migration by recruiting low-skilled labourers who depend on them by trying to practice their “existential mobility”

Paper long abstract:

The paper investigates the working of a transnational labour network from Northern Hungary to Germany by shedding light on the role of informal recruiters, a particular kind of migration intermediaries in facilitating migration by recruiting those precariat, low-skilled labourers from Hungary who depend on them by trying to practice their “right to escape” (Mezzadra 2004) through “existential mobility” (Hage 2009).

Within low-end temporary labour markets, both private, profit seeking formal intermediaries and informal recruiters are widely used by firms and workers in the European Union due to the neoliberal labour marker deregulation and the rise of the desire of flexibility under fierce competition within corporate strategies. These wider global political economic contexts gave rise to the burgeoning use of informal intermediaries by companies in Western Europe who encourage and export low-skilled, destitute labourers from the semi-peripheral Eastern European countries, with no command of foreign language to move to Germany (or other Western European countries) by facilitating their employment, travel and accommodation in exchange for a substantial commission.

The paper, benefiting from long term ethnographic fieldwork in an economically backward region in North Hungary, and using the theoretical framework of moral economy, explores how this dependent relation is constituted and perceived by both the recruiters and their posted labourers. It also investigates what makes a good recruiter with a sustainable business, and also, upon what patterns of trust, reciprocity and moral values are those transnational labour networks based, that they are embedded in?

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores long-lasting uncertainties of urban policies leading to political tensions among policymakers, ruination, abandonment, and depopulation of a landscape, and various forms of dispossession of its residents – both older residents and migrant newcomers – in Eskisehir, Turkey.

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores long-lasting uncertainties of urban policies which have led to multiple forms of abandonment and dispossession in an urban zone and its residents – both older residents and migrant newcomers – in Eskisehir, Turkey. Karapınar zone in Eskişehir has been subject to urban renewal initiatives of municipal governments since 2011 which have been repeatedly disrupted due to political and financial conflicts among various stakeholders of the renewal projects leading to an uneven restructuring of urban space and abandonment of massive landscape, buildings, as well as its residents. The ongoing process of abandonment and the future uncertainties resulted in the depopulation of the zone that cause not only spatial ruination but also social decay.

On the other hand, designated to be one of the satellite cities in Turkey, Eskişehir has been a city where refugees under International Protection, mainly from Afghanistan, have been emplaced. During the process of abandonment and depopulation, therefore, Karapınar has become a place where refugees have settled. The paper ethnographically investigates the process of uncertainties in this abandoned urban zone which has been entangled with multiple forms of socioeconomic and political displacement of both older residents and newcomers, as well as affective discourses, conflicts, and also emerging sociabilities among them.

Paper short abstract:

This paper follows transformations of labor dependencies in the port of Piraeus, Greece. I will argue that paradoxically, the integration of the port into the global supply chain market unleashed neighborhood-level dynamics between local subcontractors and dockworkers seeking employment

Paper long abstract:

Amidst various negotiation phases during the last decade, the formerly state-owned port of Piraeus, Greece, was finally sold to the Chinese terminal operator COSCO, integrating thus Piraeus into the global supply chain market. Following the global trend around the restructuring of labor regimes in logistics, the new era brought radical changes in labor organization and relations in the container piers of the port. While labor was traditionally controlled through a complex system of interdependency between trade unions, political parties and the state, often framed in clientistic politics, the privatization and the new precarious regimes crystallized a system of outsourced management controlled by various local subcontractors who are most of the time in minimum or nonexistent communication with the actual Chinese owners. For various agents such as trade unions, academics and activists, the concession signifies the shift from state control to “foreign interests”, by turning the port into a Chinese enclave in isolation from Greek reality. However, I will argue that paradoxically, the “globalization” of Piraeus shifted the level of dependencies from the abstract realm of the state and the parties, to the deep neighborhood level and face to face knowledge. Since the subcontractors are mostly locals, with particular family names and histories in the Piraeutic neighborhoods, ethnography reveals that employment in times of crisis requires particular relations, behaviors and reciprocities that exceed the work space and sprawled across the everyday life and geographies of Piraeus ,reconfiguring local identities and political loyalties.

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores indebted households' attempts to improve their financial livelihoods by contesting their debts through legal procedures. The contestation of creditor-debtor relations involves the formation of new asymmetrical and conflicting dependent relations with legal representatives.

Paper long abstract:

Since the 20th century, the discipline of anthropology has developed a rich body of literature on credit/debt, indebtedness, and the unequal power relations between creditors and debtors, often with an explicit focus on the moral and temporal dimensions (see e.g., Graeber 2011; Kar 2019; Peebles 2010). Apart from notable exceptions (see e.g., Bear 2015; Riles 2011; Stout 2019) insufficient scholarly attention has been given to the role of (predatory) bureaucracy, (often complex/obfuscated) quasi-public institutional actors, and the socio-legal aspects of debt in which debtors are situated. Based on two mutually independent year-long ethnographic fieldworks in Poland and Hungary among urban middle-class households with FX loans and low-income households in default, respectively, this paper demonstrates that debts are adjustable, and they can be contested, and in cases even cancelled, through a plethora of legal procedures such as litigation, invoking (supra-) national legal frameworks, and debt negotiation. However, doing so often requires the formation of dependent relations with specialized profit-seeking legal actors who eagerly take advantage of asymmetrical relations and knowledge gaps of debtors . Financially precarious households, then, must navigate between various competing and conflicting dependent relations (i.e. debtor in relation to the creditor, lawyer, and debt collector) in order to improve their livelihoods.

Paper short abstract:

Rural entrepreneurs running digital kiosks in Indian villages navigate the tensions presented by the double pursuits of community development and profit making. Their lived experience of entrepreneurship is that of dependency, to which they fuse their own desires of self-determination.

Paper long abstract:

Rural entrepreneurs running digital kiosks are vital agents of the Indian government’s flagship e-governance program, that brings much needed 'development' to neglected communities. My study sheds light on how they navigate the tensions presented by the double pursuits of community development and profit making, while being dependent on the program's parameters and logics. Planners of the program laud its public-private partnership (PPP) model and juxtapose economic wins with risk and volatile income possibilities. Critiques highlight the precarity and uncertainity that drive entrepreneurs to seek economic opportunities outside the program‘s prescribed norms. While arguments of both frameworks are valid, they fail to critically engage with entrepreneurship as a mode of economic subjectification wedged between expectations, aspirations, compromises and renouncement.

The figure of the rural entrepreneur encapsulates three cross cutting impulses – provision of governance services, beneficiaries (and benefactors) of the state’s focus on livelihood generation in rural areas, and vital infrastructures for new sites of capital accumulation. My ongoing research with Village Level Entrepreneurs (VLEs) asks how they actively imagine and interpret the multifacetedness of their role, which are sometimes at odds. To be an entrepreneur is to make these tensions functional and complementary through deliberate action. Their lived experience of entrepreneurship is that of dependency, to which they fuse their own desires of self-determination. The program's rural entrepreneurs are the vocational embodiments of the tensions that arise from the open-ended amalgamations of giving disenfranchised people access to rights while at the same time generating new markets supported by government backing.

Paper short abstract:

The paper explores the agency of over-indebted people through the lens of citizenship. Based on in-depth narrative interviews with debtors, I examine how the construction of deservingness legitimatise dependencies and unequal power relations – and how people try to oppose and negotiate through it.

Paper long abstract:

Despite formal equality in a democratic society, rights and practices often do not correspond to the legal status of citizens (Gonzales, Sigona, 2017). Citizenship is a dynamic (constantly contested) institution of both domination and empowerment. Both claim-making and imposition of control closely reflect the values and norms of a society.

With the predominance of neoliberal framing, the experience of poverty and economic precarity had often been framed as an individual failure, overlooking the structural context of agency, a wider net of social and power relations, and racial hierarchies. The inability to achieve “economic independence” is seen not only as a lack of competence but also as an inability to live up to the moral values of society - consequently legitimising the transgression of rights of those who are labelled as “failed”, “dependent”, and “undeserving”. It also impacts their social position and self-perception.

With ongoing welfare state retrenchment, many low-income households become dependent on privately provided financial services (Soederberg, 2014). Their position is shaped not only by the welfare-labour nexus but also by the rules of financial actors that accelerate the logic of individualisation of responsibility (Berry, 2015)

Based on thirty in-depth narrative interviews with over-indebted people in the Czech Republic, I explore how can internalised discourses of deservingness legitimatise and reproduce dependencies and unequal, sometimes exploitative power relations. I also look for the ways in which these people try to negotiate their rights, status and dignity, enacting “themselves as citizens by usurping the right to claim rights” (Isin, 2009)

Paper short abstract:

Family entrepreneurs recruit unemployed relatives and friends, placing them in dependent relations. The paper explores the factors that cause these relations to be accepted, maintained or rejected, and the social consequences for family enterprises, kinship and friendship groups

Paper long abstract:

From an anthropological perspective, economic uncertainty is seen not only as a feature of the labor market, but in much broader sense as a social reality associated with risk and instability that affects every step of people's struggle for livelihood. Since 1989, Bulgarian society has been undergoing permanent processes associated with multidimensional uncertainty - economic, social, and existential. One of the attempts to overcome the risks of social exclusion and marginalization is the establishment of small family enterprises. In these, family relations are intertwined with professional roles and a specific notion of work-kinship relations emerges. Many enterprises offer job to unemployed relatives, whereby the employees, whose status in the kinship hierarchy is higher, fall into dependent relations to their younger relatives. Similar relationships arise in the hiring of job-losing friends and former colleagues, even with higher education than the family entrepreneurs. In these cases, a direct dependency and close relations between the informal (friendship, kinship) sphere and the formal work environment emerges. The constitution, development and adoption of these new dependent relations, different from hierarchical kinship and egalitarian friendship ties, is one of the main research tasks. The paper explores the economic and social factors as a reason for accepting and rethinking, or rejecting these dependent relations, and the social consequences for the family enterprise, kinship and friendship groups. I will examine the imposition, development and transformation of personal leadership styles in small family enterprises through the construction of quasi-family relationships that seek to perpetuate dependent relations in working life.

Paper short abstract:

The paper compares perceptions of insecurity in a city and a village in Bulgaria. Tourism creates 85% of jobs in the city (Velingrad); low income is a source of insecurity. Half of the village workforce works in the city but due to higher cohesion, low incomes do not generate insecurity.

Paper long abstract:

In the context of deepening inequality between regions in Bulgaria, economic insecurity is often present in the mountainous regions of the country. This paper compares perceptions of insecurity in two neighboring mountain settlements in the Western Rhodopes: a small city and a village. Over 60 mineral springs flow through their territories. Balneal tourism creates 85% of jobs in the city (Velingrad) and has radically transformed it over the last two decades. A major problem for local people (and for businesses too) is the low income of those employed in tourism. About half of the workforce of the neighboring village (Draginovo) works in the tourist companies in the town. However, low incomes are not perceived in the village as a source of insecurity. Low income is only a component, albeit an important one, in the "moral economy" of the households in Draginovo. The social environment, characterized by informality, family and kinship relations, contribute to the maintenance of traditional economic practices such as household farms. The latter supplement family incomes, including thanks to kinship solidarity. Conversely, trends towards the atomization of social life in the city of Velingrad and the neo-liberalism of labor relations there create a negative moral environment that reinforces insecurity and social distrust. Higher degrees of connectivity and interdependence in the village are factors in social reproduction and the vitality of the local community.

Paper short abstract:

This paper will focus on the adaptive responses of Roma and non-Roma migrants from Baia Mare to deindustrialization, attempting to compare their strategies and work histories to see to what extent class and race differences play a role in debt dependency and specific migration patterns.

Paper long abstract:

Baia Mare region was once one of Romania's main mining centers, with a significant proportion of the local population engaged in industry jobs. However, the extensive economic restructuring that followed the collapse of the old communist regime and the emergence of capitalist development was characterized by brutal privatization measures and great economic instability. While the transition years brought new opportunities for some, for most they meant unstable housing and employment, debt, and declining social status. Thus, many workers quickly became 'surplus populations' (Tania Li), and were forced into patterns of circular migration abroad.

Employing a qualitative research methodology, analyzing both interviews and secondary data, this paper will focus on the adaptive responses of Baia Mare workers to the changes in the socio-economic landscape after the collapse of the communist regime and the advance of neoliberal policies in Romania. In particular, we will look at Roma and non-Roma migrants from Baia Mare, attempting to compare their strategies and work histories in the context of migration to see to what extent class and race differences play a role in creating specific migration patterns in the post-socialist context. The comparison between racialized people living in improvised shelters on the periphery of Baia Mare and those who are working class but not living in a situation of destitution will show us the role that dispossession plays in creating certain conditions that lead to debt dependency and specific migration patterns.