Sergei Shubin

The role of recruitment agencies in imagining and producing the ‘good’ migrant

This paper focuses on representations of labour migrants and interrogates how such imaginaries shape migrant recruitment and employment regimes. The recruitment and employment of labour migrants inevitably involves a range of knowledge practices that affect who is recruited, from where and for what purposes. In particular, this paper seeks to advance understandings of how images of ‘bodily goodness’ are represented graphically and how perceptions of migrant workers influence the recruitment of workers to the UK from Latvia. The research described in this paper is based on interviews with recruitment agencies, employers and policy makers carried out in Latvia in 2011. The analysis results in a schema of the ‘filtering’ processes that are enacted to ‘produce’ the ‘ideal’ migrant worker. An important original contribution of this paper is that it details how recruitment agencies, in not only engaging in the spatially selective recruitment of labour from certain places but also drawing socially constructed boundaries around migrant bodies, play a key part in shaping migration geographies both in sending and destination countries.

Networked poverty in rural Russia

Abstract This article attempts to apply major ideas developed in Anglo-American ‘network analysis’ to enlarge geographical constructions of the rural ‘problematic’ in Russia. It interrogates complex understandings of ‘poor people’ via a study of social networks in two villages in Central European Russia, focusing on connections between different actors embedded in social contexts in the countryside, different forms of associations between rural people, and the ways in which specific forms of their interrelations affect poverty. In so doing, the article attempts to reconnect different positions of rural people in Russia and different transitory aspects of ‘poor’ identities (i.e. of people in poverty), as well as to broaden understanding of differentiated experiences of rural poverty.

Imaginaries of the ideal migrant worker: a Lacanian interpretation

This paper explores the production of ‘ideal’ migrant workers by recruitment agencies in the context of Latvian labour migration to the UK. The fantasies of the ‘ideal’ worker created by recruiters have a particular hold on migrant subjectivity, but they often hide inconsistencies and slippages implicit within the fabric of recruitment discourse and practice. By drawing on the notions of fantasy and desire as developed by Jacques Lacan, this paper analyses the determination of subjectivity in a migration context and explores both unconscious and conscious processes of identification. On the basis of an analysis of drawings sketched by respondents during qualitative interviews conducted in Latvia, it challenges narrower assumptions about migrants’ search behaviour and stable expectations of labour migration, and exposes the split and contested nature of migrant selfhood. It concludes with conceptual observations about the complex process of identification and the unachievable figure of the ‘ideal’ worker.

Travelling as being: understanding mobility amongst Scottish Gypsy Travellers

This paper focuses on the mobility of Scottish Gypsy Travellers as a part of their way of life. It considers both the imaginative and corporeal travel of these people within northeast Scotland. The paper uses Heideggers conceptual thinking to understand their being on the move. It emphasises the primacy of the process of movement before signification and coding and offers thinking through affectivity, emergence, and potentiality to recognise multiple ways through which travelling people sense place and movement. Through an investigation of the mobile living practices of Scottish Gypsy Travellers and their belonging-together, the paper argues for a relational logic which can attend to the complexity of their involvement with the world.

Integration and Mobility of Eastern European Migrants in Scotland

This paper explores theoretical and practical issues related to employment migration and integration of Eastern European migrants in Scotland. Emerging mobile lifestyles create different patterns of living and working ‘on the move’, which challenge existing social policies. By drawing on theorizations of mobility and integration from economics and geography, we propose a broader conceptualization of integration that recognizes the changing migration trajectories of Eastern European migrants. We adopt an interdisciplinary approach to the collection and analysis of data gathered from individual interviews and survey data in order to investigate the relationships between the movement of migrants, integration and employment.

From individuals to networks: Unfolding complex poverty in rural Ireland

The paper deals with the practices and experiences constraining the lives of rural people in Ireland. It examines the roles of different forms of associations between rural people in the production of poverty using the results of a research project carried out in the village of Ros Muc in Connemara. The paper argues that various links between rural actors define differentiated access to the network resources, which in turn affects poverty and marginalisation. By unfolding multiple connections which create rural problems the article reveals complex and changeable poverty. Starting from the analysis of social stratification systems and exclusionary trends, the paper later examines the locally contested dialectic of polarisation, moral marginalisation and cultural disengagement. The article takes on board the findings from this study to critically re-evaluate certain stereotypes of poverty and to articulate the need for broader understanding of disadvantage.

Labour Market and Social Integration of Eastern European Migrants in Scotland and Portugal

This article investigates the factors influencing the labour market performance and social integration of Eastern European migrants in two regions within Scotland and Portugal. Given the potential links between these outcomes, measures of labour market success and integration into the host community are examined from a multi-dimensional perspective, including by modelling these jointly within a statistical framework. The main findings indicate the importance of a range of factors for labour market and social integration, which change with time and cannot be limited to any definable set of goals. In particular, proficiency in the host country’s language plays a key role in obtaining a highly paid job and social integration, but not for the probability of employment. Further, maintaining family links and cultural identity often outweigh the importance of being integrated into host communities. Other human capital factors, especially whether the job matches skills and qualifications, strongly influence some labour market outcomes, whilst migrant network variables are important for integration more widely. Focus on the immediate earnings and having a job tends to be prioritised over career progression, which can lead to better integration. Drawing on the insights from economics and human geography, this paper stresses that these findings hold both in the separate and joint modelling approaches. The effect of the influences is also found to be generally similar in Scotland and Portugal. However, some significant differences are detected between the host communities with regards to the impact of previous migration and friendship on social integration and age on employment.

Critical Perspectives on Histories of ‘Madness’ and Migration

‘For mortals, there is nothing worse than wandering’. This passage from Homer’s Odyssey draws our attention to the existence of the long-standing tradition of negative depiction of travel and its association with a deviation from the path of reason. In the Greek tragedy, Odysseus’ wandering is often seen as a journey of ‘madness’ and alienation from oneself and society, since it is described as a voyage with no return, the process of driving him ‘out’ or ‘aside’ from his mind and making him express himself differently through movement. Like Odysseus, Heracles’ ‘mad’ wandering involved physical travels and mental displacement (metaphorical journeys in his mind), which helped him to return home only to be driven out again to find himself away, totally homeless and lost. As Montiglio notes, in Greek literature ‘madness, like exile, was wandering because it alienated the mad from self and society.’ In Homeric poems, such crazed travelling was often identified with hubris, the transgression of society’s recognized moral barriers, a broader substitute for unreason. Several characters in Greek tragedies (Io, Argus) expressed the cause for their mad wandering as oistros, a sort of terror or frenzy associated with insanity, which forced them to wander without purpose, transgress boundaries of ‘sense’ and pushed them into exile from settled society. Here the links between madness and fear are established, and mad travellers are seen as consumed with hubris, shame and pride that make them tear themselves apart. Furthermore, mad wandering in Greek tragedy was associated with the human condition and the inner conflict of minds divided against themselves, where travelling offered paths to resolution or ‘therapy’ by allowing the insane to ‘wander out’ of society.

The Church and Mobility: Dealing with the Exclusion of Eastern European Migrants in Rural Scotland

Abstract The paper explores theoretical and practical issues related to mobility and integration of Eastern European migrants in rural Scotland. Regionalized structure of socio-political organizations and dominant ‘sedentary’ thinking (Cresswell, 2001) often lead to exclusion of Eastern European migrants in the British countryside. The church and other key rural institutions often do not take into account complex mobility practices of migrants including affective relationships with existing immigrant communities, family support strategies, unpredictable travelling behaviour and cross-border social links. To address this gap, the paper, first, considers opportunities within the church to attend to affective dimension of movement in order to facilitate migrants’ inclusion in the rural communities. Second, the paper argues for development of pro-mobility thinking within the church and other rural institutions which appreciates different forms of movement and empowers marginalized itinerant groups. It concludes with theoretically informed observations about the new ways of conceptualizing ‘mobility’ and ‘integration’ of Eastern European migrants in the British rural communities.