The contemporary world is increasingly defined by mobility – of people, memory, information, services, cultural and social practices – to the extent that more fluid, mobile and transnational belonging trajectories and identification frameworks are becoming an increasing trend. However, such positioning possibility is a privilege that cannot be extended to the current migration crises involving millions of people of different nationalities forced to leave their homelands.

Scholarly interest in migration and diaspora can be traced back to the beginning of the 20^th century. It is worth considering how the constantly evolving ranges of critical approaches and methodological frameworks of the field can be productively applied to the current situation.

Centre of Excellence in Estonian Studies welcomes international scholars from different fields to reflect on the issues of migration and diasporas, incl. questions of exile. Topics addressed include but are not limited to

The conference working language is English. Papers should not exceed 20 minutes in presentation. Please submit your proposal of up to 300 words via online form on the conference webpage. All accepted abstracts will be included in the books of abstracts of the conference.

Organizing Committee

KEYNOTE

Sari Pöyhönen

Parallel Realities of Forced Migration, Belonging and Non-Belonging

Forced migration as an object of study is predominantly associated with flows of populations rather than movements of named individuals (Phipps 2016). During the particular political turbulence of the ‘refugee crisis’, where identity inscriptions, such as religion, ethnicity, and gender are securitized, it is important to pay attention to the emic side of the stories and lived experiences of individuals. Instead of avoiding stranger fetishism (Ahmed 2000), we need to focus on how an individual in a situation of forced migration is an effect of processes of inclusion and exclusion—belonging and non-belonging. This leads to multi-sited policy-making, which is not only top-down or bottom-up, but a complex, organic, and situated system that regulates individuals’ lived experiences and shows inequalities in the social structure.

In this paper, I will focus on two individuals, Fatema and Bakr, behind the human cargo (Moorehead 2005/2016). Fatema is a highly educated woman who fled to Finland from Iraq with her two children. Her husband has disappeared, and no one knows if he is dead or alive. Bakr is an actor and atheist, whose artistic performance is interpreted in his home country of Iraq as hostile to the political regime and Islamic religion. They both have lived in Finland since 2015. The stories of Fatema and Bakr derive from two linguistic ethnographies—one in a reception center in a rural Swedish-dominant region, and another in the heart of Helsinki, Finnish National Theatre.

Fatema and Bakr are examples of refugees seeking asylum, who live parallel realities both here within their current places and relationships and there by maintaining relationships with those who remain and the memories of the places from which they have been dislocated (Butler & Spivak 2007). They also experience moments of not-yet-belonging (Anderson et al. 2011) or non-belonging (Holzberg et al. 2018). Still, the most painful question remains: Have they escaped from, and to, misery?

Ahmed, S. (2000). Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-Coloniality. London: Routledge.

Anderson, B., Gibney, M. J. & Paoletti, E. (2011). “Citizenship, Deportation and the Boundaries of Belonging.” Citizenship Studies 15:5, 547–563.

Butler, J. & Spivak, G.C. (2007). Who Signs the Nation-State? Language, Politics, Belonging. London, UK: Seagull Books.

Holzberg, B., Kolbe, K. & Zaborowski, R. (2018). “Figures of Crisis: The Delineation of (Un)Deserving Refugees in the German Media.” Sociology 52:3, 534–550.

Moorehead, C. (20015/2015). Human Cargo: A Journey Among Refugees. London: Chatto & Windus.

Phipps, A. (2016). “Refugee Crisis. How Should the Government and the EU Address It. A 10 Point Plan by Alison Phipps.” The National. http://www.thenational.scot/comment/refugee-crisis-how-should-the-government-and-the-eu-address-it-a-10-point-plan-by-alison-phipps.7223

Sari Pöyhönen is professor of applied linguistics at the Centre for Applied Language Studies, University of Jyvaskyla, Finland. Her research and writing focus on language, identity and belonging, minorities and language rights, migration and asylum policies, and adult migrant language education. Through linguistic ethnography, creative inquiry and narrative approaches she is focusing on individuals interacting with others and telling their stories that are embedded with wider cultural and political contexts and social structures.

KEYNOTE

Vytis Čiubrinskas

Challenges of Transnational Belonging: Homeland Nationalism, Cultural Citizenship, and Social Remittances of Diasporic Lithuanians in the U.S.

The processes of transnationalism, large-scale transmigration from Eastern Europe (e.g., Poland, the Baltics, and the Balkans) to North America, created ‘new realities’ of an expansion of space for personal and familial practices (Olwig & Sorensen 2002) as well as within social and political fields. For instance, the presidents of all three post-communist Baltic States at the turn of the twenty-first century came from diasporas, although old Soviet models of sociability are still noticeably transmitted there. We argue for a grass-roots level of understanding of the complexities of Eastern European transnationalism and inter-ethnic relations. Our work is based on ethnographic fieldwork done in Chicago in 2006 and 2013 among Eastern European immigrants and in Lithuania in 2014 among Lithuanian-American and Lithuanian-Canadian return migrants.

We discuss three cases of “cultural embeddedness” and the uncertainties of transnational belonging, in which the immigrant challenges the social and cultural resources of the host country and takes them back to his or her homeland. The first case looks at the diasporic politics of identity of homeland nationalism formed by Baltic exiles who fled communist advancement in their countries at the end of WWII. The second case examines cultural citizenship, i.e., “the right to be different” (Rosaldo & Flores 1997, Bretell 2008) in terms of ethnicity, native language, religion, etc. (cf. Nick-Craith 2004), framed by moral and performative dimensions of membership beyond the domain of legal rights (Glick-Schiller & Caglar 2008). This applies to the moral economy of recent post-socialist immigrants, accumulated through personalized networks in exchange for favors (Giordano 2012), and shared ‘culture’ as a model of festive culture. The third case shows challenges faced by re(migrants) returning to post-communist countries that often go beyond the economic dimension through the transference of social remittances, such as norms, initiatives, values, knowledge, and philanthropic activities, which are often met with skepticism by locals ‘having local life experiences’. We emphasize the agency and models of sociability of (re)migrants How sociocultural resources transmitted from overseas are used to cope with challenges and contestations of transnational belonging. How (re)migrants become agents of particular social and cultural practices, e.g., by creating ethnic schools in New York, co-founding a university in Kaunas (Lithuania), ‘selling jobs’ in Chicago, or recruiting ‘friends of friends’ from their homelands to sustain their businesses in the U.S.

Vytis Čiubrinskas is a Professor of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the Vytautas Magnus University, Kaunas, Lithuania and visiting Associate Professor at the Department of Anthropology, Southern Illinois University, USA. His research interests include migration and diaspora studies, ethnicity, nationalism and identity politics, anthropology of post-socialism, social memory and heritage, and politics of the discipline of anthropology /ethnology in the East/Central Europe.