All rooms are equipped with an overhead projector
Rooms C, D, E, F, G and H (H only on Saturday): slide projector (framed slides, carrousel. There are extra carrousels available to set up your presentation in advance)
Rooms C, D, M, N, O, U and Committee Room 2: beamer to connect your laptop. You have to bring you own laptop. (If you want to use your Apple notebook, please contact us, as it may be incompatible.)
Rooms C, T and U: VCR
Programme
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Tales of Strawberry Pickers: The Symbolic Geography of Romanian Migrant Workers and Diasporas
| Two million Romanians, ten per cent of Romania’s entire population, are now travelling within Europe, primarily for work. Through them, two billion American dollars enter Romania each year, sustaining an economic growth of 8 per cent in 2004. The experiences of these strawberry pickers, an affectionate name given to them by the Romanian press, have had an impact on the way the West is imagined in Romania and on the way in which symbolic journeys are envisaged. This process of coming towards an encounter with the West has its importance for a number of reasons.
These temporary diasporas have raised the importance of symbolic geography and the cultural associations the concept carries, through their double presence in a here and there that can be viewed as relative and simultaneous. Romanians working abroad have a presence both here and there, as audible minorities identifiable through foreign accents and yet easily assimilated otherwise, and as returning seasonal labourers. Their evident mobility constitutes them as image-makers for a country eager to integrate into the European Union. Equally, as Teodor Baconsky (2005), a Romanian commentator observes, they become modernising agents within the Romanian society. They have therefore the role of eroding traditional boundaries, both geographical and political or ideological.
This paper relies on interviews with members of the Romanian diaspora and Romanian migrant workers in London in order to establish the role of returning or temporary diasporas in the current debates between nationalists and Europeanists in Romania. In the current context of European integration, the public dispute between ‘traditionalists’ and ‘modernisers-Westernisers’ in Romania has gained momentum. The strawberry pickers are key to the way the West and Westernisation are viewed in a national context and in the way symbolic geography is imagined.
As a national community in the multicultural and politically disputed space of Eastern Europe, the Romanians conduct a symbolic process of imagining which resembles a Russian doll. The Romanian nation and the various European zones around it, West, East, The Balkans, are all imagined as concentric, symbolical spaces, toward which Romanians feel different degrees of belonging and toward which they undertake various journeys. The interviews reveal the actual trajectory of such journeys that speak about fluid identities and a relocating ‘Heimat’ in today’s Europe.
Two million Romanians, ten per cent of Romania’s entire population, are now travelling within Europe, primarily for work. Through them, two billion American dollars enter Romania each year, sustaining an economic growth of 8 per cent in 2004. The experiences of these strawberry pickers, an affectionate name given to them by the Romanian press, have had an impact on the way the West is imagined in Romania and on the way in which symbolic journeys are envisaged. This process of coming towards an encounter with the West has its importance for a number of reasons.
These temporary diasporas have raised the importance of symbolic geography and the cultural associations the concept carries, through their double presence in a here and there that can be viewed as relative and simultaneous. Romanians working abroad have a presence both here and there, as audible minorities identifiable through foreign accents and yet easily assimilated otherwise, and as returning seasonal labourers. Their evident mobility constitutes them as image-makers for a country eager to integrate into the European Union. Equally, as Teodor Baconsky (2005), a Romanian commentator observes, they become modernising agents within the Romanian society. They have therefore the role of eroding traditional boundaries, both geographical and political or ideological.
This paper relies on interviews with members of the Romanian diaspora and Romanian migrant workers in London in order to establish the role of returning or temporary diasporas in the current debates between nationalists and Europeanists in Romania. In the current context of European integration, the public dispute between ‘traditionalists’ and ‘modernisers-Westernisers’ in Romania has gained momentum. The strawberry pickers are key to the way the West and Westernisation are viewed in a national context and in the way symbolic geography is imagined.
As a national community in the multicultural and politically disputed space of Eastern Europe, the Romanians conduct a symbolic process of imagining which resembles a Russian doll. The Romanian nation and the various European zones around it, West, East, The Balkans, are all imagined as concentric, symbolical spaces, toward which Romanians feel different degrees of belonging and toward which they undertake various journeys. The interviews reveal the actual trajectory of such journeys that speak about fluid identities and a relocating ‘Heimat’ in today’s Europe.
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