Antropologian naisongelma

Aineisto on Keskustakampuksen kirjaston digitoimaa ja kirjasto vastaa aineiston käyttöluvista

Between Security and Mobility: Negotiating a Hardening Border Regime in the Russian-Estonian Borderland

This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies on 27th Feb 2015, available online: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1369183X.2015.1015408Since the end of the Cold War order post-Soviet borders have been characterised by geopolitical tensions and divergent imaginations of desirable political and spatial orders. Drawing upon ethnographic research in two border towns at the Russian-Estonian border, the article makes a case for a grounded examination of these border dynamics that takes into account how borders as sites of ‘mobility and enclosure’ are negotiated in everyday life and shaped by the differentiated incorporations of statecraft into people’s lives. Depending on their historical memories, people interpret the border either as a barrier to previously free movement or as a security device and engage in correspondingly different relations to the state – privileging local concerns for mobility or adopting the state’s concerns over security and sovereignty. Analysing these border negotiations and the relations between citizens and the state, articulated in people’s expectations and claims, can provide us with a better understanding of how people participate in the making of borders and contribute to the stability and malleability of political orders

Working across the East-North divide: experiences from a research project on European fringe areas

The paper presents a study (2007‒2010) on transformation processes of peripheral rural communities in four countries in the northern and eastern Europe. The comparative study was based on the participating researchers’ long-term ethnographic fieldwork in Finland, Estonia, Russia and Ukraine. The research group approached rural transformation from the perspectives of gender and age, perspectives which have been less used in studies dealing with the so-called transition countries than in western Europe and elsewhere. The researchers also questioned the validity of a rigid division between “countries-in-transition” and “Western countries” by comparing cases and localities across this divide, on thematic grounds such as the rural dwellers’ relationship to the European Union, sustainable livelihoods, and relationship between the state and its peripheries. All rural locations studied share a peripheral position, geographically and/or economically, in relation to their national centre, but the national and international contexts of which they are part are very different. However, the European Union is a key factor that affects rural people’s lives and life prospects in all the research areas. The general research question was: how do people who live in peripheral rural areas react and respond to recent changes in their lives brought about by post-socialism and/or European Union membership? In accordance with the decline of agriculture and its possibilities to offer a livelihood in rural areas, people are faced with serious questions concerning their future in their home area. The reverse of the downsizing of the welfare or socialist state is the activity of people themselves, and the initiative they take. What is the role of culture and local traditions in this? What kinds of guidelines does the local way of life offer for living in the periphery? What are the dimensions of well-being in the peripheral rural localities studied

Families on the move in Europe: children’s perspectives

In this article we introduce the on-going (2012-2014) international collaborative project Families on the Move Across Borders: Children’s Perspectives on Labour Migration in Europe. First, we present the project and its aims; then, we briefl y discuss the current state of migration research on families and children in order to explain how our research can contribute to a fuller inclusion of children in social analysis, not only by challenging the theoretical debates, but also through our empirically rich study. We aim to contribute to the advancement of methodology in childhood and migration studies by studying migration experiences from the child’s perspective. We discuss the challenges inherent in researching children and describe the methods we have found to be most suitable for investigating families and children in a holistic way. We argue that the experiences of children are of paramount importance to understanding the present-day realities of transnational family life and simultaneously endeavour to make sense of the nascent futures of such European families. Finally, we present some preliminary findings from our on-going research and map out the diverse avenues this research is taking