Labor Migration in and from Eastern Europe

Eastern, Central, and Southeast Europe offer a critical vantage point for understanding the complexities of migration, one of the defining forces of our time. Labor migration in and from this region has shaped economies, social structures, and political debates across Europe and beyond. Yet these movements are often overlooked or oversimplified in public discourse.

Since the nineteenth century, people have moved to, from, and within Eastern Europe in search of employment and social mobility. In many of the region's cities and localities, labor migration has transformed local economies, altered political dynamics, and reshaped everyday social life. In destination countries, these movements have contributed to the formation of new diaspora communities and increasingly interconnected labor markets. At the same time, migrants have built transnational networks and sustained cross-border cultural and economic ties that link workplaces, households, and communities across Europe.

This lecture series explores labor migration in and from Eastern Europe, broadly conceived, from a wide range of disciplinary and geographic perspectives. Across fourteen lectures, anthropologists, historians, sociologists and scholars from related fields trace key themes in labor migration from the nineteenth century to the present. Topics include border regimes and the racialization of migrants, precarity, informality, and remittances, as well as return migration and gendered dimensions of care and domestic work.

Organization
Sandra King-Savić, Jonathan Raspe
University of Zurich, Department of Slavic and Eastern European Studies

Contact
sandra.king-savic@uzh.ch

Lecture Series: Labor Migration in and from Eastern Europe (PDF, 39 KB)

Tuesdays, 18:15 – 19:45 CET

The lecture series will take place online only (via Zoom). Admission is free. Please note that the program is subject to change.

Individual lectures are available as podcasts. The recordings can be found on SWITCHcast Media Space and on the YouTube channel of the Institute for Slavic and Eastern European Studies: Playlist Deutsch/English

Sara Bernard is Lecturer in Societal Transformations in Central and South-East Europe at the University of Glasgow. Her research interests include labor migration in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and international cooperation during the Cold War, with a focus on socialist Yugoslavia. She is the author of Deutsch Marks in the Head, Shovel in the Hands: the Gastarbeiter return to Yugoslavia and a coordinator of the European Labour History Network’s Working Group on Labour Migration History.

Tobias Brinkmann is Malvin and Lea Bank Professor of Jewish Studies and History at Pennsylvania State University. A social historian, he studies modern Jewish history, migration, and urban life in Europe and North America from comparative and transnational perspectives. His latest book, Between Borders: The Great Jewish Migration from Eastern Europe, explores the journeys of Eastern European Jewish migrants and refugees to the United States from the late nineteenth century through the mid-twentieth century.

Dace Dzenovska is Associate Professor in the Anthropology of Migration at the University of Oxford. Her first book, School of Europeanness: Tolerance and Other Lessons in Political Liberalism, casts Eastern Europe as a key laboratory for the forging of post-Cold War political liberalism in Europe. Her current research projects examine the transformation of places affected by postsocialist depopulation and the mobility of people and capital to and from Latvia and the United Kingdom.

Ivan Kalmar is Professor in the Department of Anthropology and the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy at the University of Toronto. His research topics include race, Islamophobia, antisemitism, populism, and relations between Europe’s political and economic centers and peripheries. His latest book, White But Not Quite: Central Europe’s Illiberal Revolt, casts Central European illiberalism as a misguided response to the region’s transition to capitalism in the 1990s, exploring the close relation between racism towards Central Europeans and racism by Central Europeans.

Marta Kindler is Assistant Professor at the Centre of Migration Research and the Institute for Social Prevention and Resocialisation at the University of Warsaw. Her research focuses on Ukrainian migration, migrant domestic work, social networks, and the role of intermediaries in migration processes. She is the author of A Risky Business? Ukrainian Migrant Women in Warsaw’s Domestic Work Sector and co-editor of Ukrainian Migration to the European Union: Lessons from Migration Studies.

Sandra King-Savić is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Zurich whose work combines migration studies with cultural sociology and ethnographic research. Her first book, Forging Transnational Belonging through Informal Trade: Thriving Markets in Times of Crisis, uses the case study of Novi Pasar in the 1990s to examine how citizens mobilize transnational networks to engage in informal petty trade in order to cope with state breakdown and socioeconomic disruption. Her current research explores migration, belonging, integration, diaspora politics, and the experiences of migrants and refugees from the former Yugoslavia in Switzerland.

Daria Krivonos is a sociologist at the Centre for Research on Ethnic Relations and Nationalism, University of Helsinki. Her work analyzes how race, class, and gender are remade in the contexts of East-West migration. She is the author of Race and Labour among Russian Migrants: Reclaiming Whiteness in Europe and a co-editor of Europeanisation as Violence: Souths and Easts as method. Funded by the Research Council of Finland, her current project examines nail salons in European cities as sites of feminized migrant labour, (self-)care, and racialized encounters between women.

Aleksandra Lewicki is Reader in Sociology and Co-Director of the Sussex European Institute at the University of Sussex. Her research focuses on the regulation of movement across borders, political mobilisation, structural inequality, and the political economy of race-making. She has written on citizenship and activism, institutional racism in the welfare state, anti-Muslim racism, and the racialization of ‘Eastern Europeans’ in Britain and Germany.

Mariana Peixoto Irby is a sociocultural anthropologist at the Centre of Migration Research at the University of Warsaw, whose work explores citizenship, borders, and the politics of difference in Russia and Central Asia. Based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork, her doctoral dissertation examined race, ethno-nationalism, and postcoloniality through the lens of Tajik labor migration to and from Russia. Her current research focuses on Russian migrant communities in the Caucasus and Central Asia in the wake of the war in Ukraine.

Jonathan Raspe is a postdoctoral researcher at Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations. A historian by training, his current book project examines the impact of industrialization on ethnic relations in the Soviet Union. He has published on industrial labor recruitment, indigenization campaigns, and Jewish national autonomy in Soviet Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine.

Paul Sperneac-Wolfer is a Ph.D. Candidate in Social Anthropology at the University of Barcelona and a member of the ERC-funded FOODCIRCUITS project. His research brings together labor, migration, social reproduction, and ecology in contemporary agrifood production. His ethnographic work examines Romanian migrant workers in Austria’s fresh-food sector and the broader role of migrant labor in sustaining greenhouse agriculture.

Marta Stojić Mitrović is Senior Research Associate at the Institute of Ethnography of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts in Belgrade. Her research examines migration, citizenship, border regimes, and practices of inclusion and exclusion in Serbia and the wider Balkan region. Her doctoral research addressed asylum and irregular migration in twenty-first-century Serbia, and her subsequent work has analyzed Serbia’s changing role as an external border zone of the European Union.

Oleksandra Tarkhanova is a sociologist and Research Associate at the University of St. Gallen. Her research focuses on citizenship, migration, welfare, and gender politics, with particular attention to the social consequences of war and occupation in Ukraine. Funded by an SNSF Ambizione Grant, her current project investigates how mass displacement, mass mobilization, and crises of sovereignty reshape relations between states and their citizens.