How has the UK national press described Bulgarians and Romanians?

In new research, Dora-Olivia Vicol and William Allen examine how the media reported on Bulgarians and Romanians in the run-up to transitional controls being lifted. A textual analysis revealed that the nouns identified as explicitly ‘Romanian’ tended to centre around criminality and economic poverty, and this was especially the case in tabloids

Covid and care: how to make job support schemes better

Rishi Sunak’s job support schemes were ambitious – at least initially. But did they work? In fact, argue the LSE COVID and Care Research Group, they were conceived with a particular kind of worker in mind: an able-bodied white British national who could easily work from home. Future support schemes need to reflect the large numbers of people in precarious, informal work

Constructing the eastern european other: The horsemeat scandal and the migrant other

The Horsemeat scandal in the UK in 2013 ignited a furore about consumer deception and the bodily transgression of consuming something so alien to the British psyche. The imagination of the horse as a noble and mythic figure in British history and sociological imagination was invoked to construct the consumption of horsemeat as a social taboo and an immoral proposition in the British media debates. This paper traces the horsemeat scandal and its media framing in the UK. Much of the aversion to horsemeat was intertextually bound with discourses of immigration, the expansion of the EU and the threat in tandem to the UK. Food as a social and cultural artefact laden with symbolic meaning and national pride became a platform to construct the ‘Other’ – in this case the Eastern European Other. The media debates on the horsemeat scandal interwove the opening up of the EU and particularly UK to the influx of Eastern European migration. The horsemeat controversy in implicating the Eastern Europeans for the contamination of the supply chain became a means to not just construct the ‘Other’ but also to entwine contemporary policy debates about immigration. This temporal framing of contemporary debates enables a nation to renew and contemporise its notions of ‘otherness’ while sustaining an historic social imaginary of itself

Hope, help, duty and disappointment: Romanian mobility and its discontents

This thesis sets out to explain a paradox: how is it that Romanian migrants voice a discourse of mutual avoidance and mistrust, when conationalsâ help underscores every level of their journeys? The argument proposed here is that, contrary to the dangerous naturalisation of Romanian suspicion under tropes of Balkanism, this sense of disunity is constructed everyday by a neoliberal configuration which transfers social security onto personal connections, but which precisely in doing so comes to turn connections into the idiom of voicing discontent. To illustrate this, the thesis draws upon a year of multi-sited fieldwork conducted with Romanian migrants in a North London neighbourhood, and in a Carpathian village. Situating their departure within a discussion of the countryâs tortuous post-socialist transition, I show how the sense that there was nothing left at home gave rise to the widely shared hope that anything was possible abroad. For many of those who left, however, hope was not a frictionless return to Europe, but a journey made possible only by Romanian acquaintances who were called upon, much like in the imaginary of socialist informal economies, to arrange housing, legal status, or work in the UK. It is at this intersection of hope and help, where the duty to care for others and the concern to engineer oneâs own mobility come to clash, that discontent also emerges. Focusing thus on the sociality of informal help which propels Romanian migrantsâ journeys, this thesis seeks to enrich the migration literature by reaffirming the figure of the migrant as a moral subject endowed at once with interest and affect. Looking at the formation of mistrust, another ambition of this project is to draw attention to the dangers of personalising mobility, in a political economic configuration where state-based social security is increasingly eroded.</p