The well-known challenges of international migration have triggered new departures in academic approaches, with 'diaspora studies' evolving as an interdisciplinary and even transdisciplinary field of study. Its emerging methodology shares concerns with another interdisciplinary field, the study of the relations between law and literature, which focuses on the ways in which the two cultural prac…
In 2002, the world was astonished by the appearance of the new opera star Anna Netrebko at the Salzburg Opera Festival. She was young, incredibly talented and smashingly glamorous, almost akin to the legendary Maria Callas. She quickly became the face of the world new opera and also the face of the new Russia and of the post-Soviet space. Like a speeding ro…
As a part of my transnational ethnography among Uzbek migrant workers in Moscow, Russia, and in their home village in Uzbekistan, on August 6, 2014, I trav-eled to the Fergana Valley of Uzbekistan, to a village I call “Shabboda,” from whence the majority of Uzbek migrants I met in Moscow originated. Shabboda is one of the many remittance-dependent villages in rural …
This study asks the question how highly-skilled migrants cope with professional careers on the one hand and family life on the other. To answer to this ques-tion, I conducted 36 interviews with highly-skilled migrants and seven other interviews with key informants in the Lake Geneva region, Switzerland, and the Frankfurt Rhine-Main region, Germany. The …
This emotional statement describes the long-distance ‘homecoming’ experi-ence of a young volunteer, a third-generation Armenian American from theBoston area, who arrived in Yerevan at the Zvartnots International Airport inJune 2007 to ‘discover’ his ‘ancestral homeland’ and to ‘move mountains’ inmodernArmenia.Thiswasnotajourneyalongapilgrimagetour.However,theperception of encoun…
Longstanding residents—members of formerly migrant groups whose families had been in Marshall for over a generation—often told stories that compared their own families’ migrant histories with Mexican migrants’. Many of these stories described similarities between the narrators’ migrant ancestors and contemporary Mexicans. In the passage above …
Few studies have addressed recent emigration from European countries. The refu-gee crisis and migratory pressure have helped keep academic attention over the last few decades focused on immigration, asylum, reception and integration in Europe. However, these dynamics promoting entries into European countries coexist with other fairly significant dynamics promoting departures fro…
Advancing our understanding of irregular migration in Europe as well as in other settings depends on challenging the limitations of existing research paradigms: existing theories built on limited variation in contexts of reception and a simplified conceptualization of irregularity cannot satisfactorily explain irregular migration and its consequences in Europe. This book will …