Transnational migration

In the midst of a noncommunicable disease (NCD) crisis, sport has emerged as a popular public health strategy across Oceania. Promising to turn unhealthy, obese bodies into fit, productive bodies, sport-based health programs are supposed to contribute to the economic development of Pacific Island nations. In Sāmoa, however, these efforts have been complicated by an existing web of meaning entangling sport within the transnational realities of Samoan families. Drawing from twelve months of multi-sited, ethnographic field research on sport for development (SFD) in Sāmoa, this paper demonstrates how Samoan understandings of sport reshape what it means to be a fit and productive citizen. Specifically, I illuminate (1) how sport is perceived as a “ticket” overseas and (2) how sport is perceived as a viable alternative pathway to the blessed life, especially for those (male) youth not excelling in school. Finally, I discuss (3) how SFD is a sociocultural response to a shifting transnational political economy of tautua (service) to the family, church, and village rooted in an unevenly expanding social landscape of mobility and work. This paper contributes to anthropological conversations on contemporary sporting formations in Oceania by highlighting how sport is reimagined and repackaged by Samoan youth, education leaders, and government officials as a development tool to create healthy development futures.

The symposium will be divided into two interrelated panels: (1) The rule of law and the role of law. The practical and conceptual challenges of the policies for Roma raised by the phenomenon of Roma westward migration: between political local context and legal European dimension. (2) Roma westward migration 'from the inside'. Addressing the ethno-anthropological research gap through the theories of migration. 

The first one aims at promoting a critical reflection and debate around the political and legal context of Romani migration within the EU, both in terms of inclusive and restrictive policies.

The second panel aims at bringing together papers stemming from anthropological studies centered in the internal dynamics of Roma migrant communities, also in comparison with non-Roma groups.

This paper is devoted to the scholarly career of Miron Kantorowicz (1895 - after 1977), the German-educated Russian-Jewish refugee. Kantorowicz spent the fifteen years, from 1919 to 1934, in Berlin. He is best known in contemporary Germany as “Alfred Grotjahn’s librarian”, as he was long-time assistant to Grotjahn, the founder of social hygiene, and his name is often mentioned among scholars expelled by the Nazis from Berlin University. However, Kantorowicz’s scholarly career and contributions to demography after his flight from Germany to England and his subsequent emigration to the United States are much less studied and understood. One of the reasons is that he changed his name several times. In June 1934 he immigrated to Great Britain with a provisional visa. The spelling of his family name in this country was changed to Kantorowitsch and his publications were accordingly credited. In London he found temporary work as a statistician at the Jewish Health Organisation of Great Britain (JHOGB), where his good knowledge of general British population statistics and his previous interest in Jewish demography were combined and properly utilized. In 1936, Kantorowicz published two seminal articles resulting from the reports he had prepared for JHOGB. His findings were highly acclaimed by later generations of demographers of Anglo-Jewry. Later, in the course of his migrations he became a co-founder of American demographic Sovietology. When he became a U.S. citizen, he finally settled on the name Myron K. Gordon. The paper shows how Kantorowitz’s scholarly career was re-moulded in the course of successive migrations.

How can we understand health-seeking behaviour, if the space in which this behaviour takes place stretches across borders? Is there more happening than just the increase in options? Based on examples from research on reproductive travels, medical remittances, the circulation of medicines in migrants’ personal networks, and
the revitalisation of local healing traditions through globally active NGOs, in this working paper we attempt to elaborate upon medical practices and therapeutic itineraries in a transnational framework. By looking at how people take advantage of different regulations and procedures in different national frameworks, we propose to think along the lines of therapeutic opportunity structures in order to bring in spatial theory as well as draw attention to new forms of exclusion and agency

Europe has set out its plans to foster a ‘green economy’ by 2020 focused around recycling. This pan-European recycling economy, it is argued, will have the triple virtues of, first, stopping wastes being ‘dumped’ on poor countries; second, reusing them and thus decoupling economic prosperity from demands on global resources and, third, creating a wave of employment in recycling industries. European resource recovery is represented in academic and practitioner literatures as ‘clean and green’. Underpinned by a technical and physical materialism, it highlights the clean-up of Europe’s waste management and the high-tech character of resource recovery. Analysis shows this representation to mask the cultural and physical associations between recycling work and waste work, and thus to obscure that resource recovery is mostly ‘dirty’ work. Through an empirical analysis of three sectors of resource recovery (‘dry recyclables’, textiles and ships) in Northern member states, we show that resource recovery is a new form of dirty work, located in secondary labour markets and reliant on itinerant and migrant labour, often from accession states. We show therefore that, when wastes stay put within the EU, labour moves to process them. At the micro scale of localities and workplaces, the reluctance of local labour to work in this new sector is shown to connect with embodied knowledge of old manufacturing industries and a sense of spatial injustice. Alongside that, the positioning of migrant workers is shown to rely on stereotypical assumptions that create a hierarchy, connecting reputational qualities of labour with the stigmas of different dirty jobs – a hierarchy upon which those workers at the apex can play.   

Anti-Semitism was a conspicuous element of university life in interwar Poland. In the 1920s and 1930s, under the pressure from extreme nationalists, the five faculties of medicine in Warsaw, Cracow, Lwów, Wilno and Poznań introduced a range of discriminatory measures that led to a decrease in the percentage of Jewish medical students in Poland from 35% in 1921 to just 10% in 1938. The remaining Jewish students were forced to sit in humiliating ‘ghetto benches’ and were frequently assaulted on university premises by extreme nationalist gangs. During the Second World War, an autonomous Polish School of Medicine was established at the University of Edinburgh. The teaching staff and the student body of the School, comprised of refugees who were displaced by the German and Soviet invasions of Poland in September 1939, included both a significant number of Polish Jews as well as some prominent pre-war anti-Semites. Reliable evidence suggests, however, that anti-Jewish discrimination and violence did not resurface at this unique wartime institution. This research-in-progress paper therefore analyses a combination of different factors that might have played a role in preventing the rise of anti-Semitism at the Polish School of Medicine in Edinburgh. The following factors are so far identified: a growing sense of national unity among Polish medical refugees, concerns over negative reactions from the British hosts, stricter control over student life and organisations, relative weakness of Polish extreme nationalists and a deliberately low profile adopted by Polish Jews. This paper also discusses some methodological and ethical problems surrounding the study of Polish-Jewish relations before and during the Second World War. 

The Polish School of Medicine (PSM) at the University of Edinburgh was an autonomous Polish-language faculty in the years 1941-1949. The teaching staff and the student body of the PSM were comprised of Polish nationals who were displaced by the German and Soviet invasions of Poland in September 1939. This study analyses the wartime migration of Polish medics to Edinburgh with the use of two theoretical models developed by Egon Kunz and Rune Johansson. Both models distinguish between ‘anticipatory’ and ‘acute’ refugee movements, and recognise three types of displacement – by flight, by force, and by absence (réfugiés sur place). Kunz’s ‘kinetic model of refugee movements’ accounts for the ‘push-and-pull’ factors that determine the direction of refugee movements. Johansson’s multi-level model of ‘refugee predicament’ complements the analysis of structural forces with the inclusion of two more subjective sets of factors – barriers and resources and values and objectives.  Accordingly, this study analyses the involuntary migration of Polish medics to Edinburgh during the Second World War as a multi-step ‘acute’ refugee movement, which was triggered by a sudden ‘push’ event, namely the German and Soviet invasion of Poland. This study also points out that organised help and information provided by Polish and British authorities, combined with individual resources of the refugees, allowed the latter to penetrate several political and geographical boundaries on their way to Edinburgh. Finally, it is argued that, apart from the need for survival, patriotic duty and a sense of ‘exilic mission’ also motivated the Polish medical refugees’ long march towards the capital of Scotland. This study demonstrates that the existing theoretical models of refugee movements can with some necessary modifications be applied to a historical case study of the wartime migration of Polish medics to Edinburgh. These models allow us to analyse victims of forced migration not only as ‘helpless pawns’ of structural forces, but also as agents who sometimes have the possibility to decide their own fate.

The article examines the medium-term political fallouts of France's massive recruitment of colonial workers and soldiers during WWI. It argues that this move inaugurated lasting patterns of (post-)colonial migrations to France, which augured the Empire's crumbling in the course of worldwide decolonization after 1945.

The study of migration and immigrant communities in and from Latin America and the Caribbean has experienced a renaissance over the past thirty years, covering issues such as adaptation and integration, race and ethnicity, and labor and politics. While much of the historical studies have examined the flows coming from Europe (e.g. Baily and Ramella, 1988, Lesser 1994, Moya 1998, Devoto 2003, Lewis Nouwen 2013), scholars have begun assessing the experience of Arabic-speaking immigrants (Gonzalez 1990, Lesser 1999, Alfaro-Velcamp 2007). Of these works, few have scrutinized the various Muslim communities that formed over the course of the twentieth century. This presentation will introduce attendees to the general contours of Muslim immigration to Latin America and the Caribbean, noting its diversity across space and time and focusing on its institutions. The conversation will assess also its contemporary place in local societies across the region.