Indre Genelyte
PhD student
https://liu.se/en/employee/indge48
Finished Projects
Lost in Mobility?
This thesis seeks to make both theoretical and empirical contributions to the understanding of intra-EU mobility, with a focus on labour migration from Lithuania to Sweden. The thesis aims to help to explain the dynamics and individual decision-making behind mass labour emigration from the Baltic states, its socioeconomic consequences and policy responses.
The dissertation shows that the consequences of the neoliberal policies of the post-communist and post-crisis transformations, together with the construction of formal migration channels after EU accession, constitute various migrant categories. Individual strategies of actively looking for channels to exit and enter, combining them in different ways at various points of the migratory process and establishing informal social networks are re-constituting who can be and who is a migrant. Furthermore, following the economic crisis and austerity measures, the decision to emigrate extends beyond individual survival strategies, instead becoming bound to an individual’s perception of the (ine)quality of life and pursuit of a better quality of life for oneself and one’s family across time and in different places.
East-West labour migration - Sweden and Baltics
Charles Woolfson, Professor Emeritus
The right for European Union (EU) citizens to move freely across national borders within the EU is considered one of the EUs fundamental four freedoms and is itself a form of response to the need for regional competitiveness in the global economy. However, a possible downside of free movement is a purported downward gravitational effect on established labour standards in terms of wage levels, employment relationships and working environment conditions created by the growing availability of migrant labour originating from lower wage domains with inferior conditions and, at the same time, subject to exploitation in the labour process as vulnerable transnational workers. This project seeks an integrated theoretical and empirical approach in exploring the impact of East-West migration on the patterns of industrial relations, working environment, and welfare regimes from the point of view of both the sending and receiving countries within a regional migration complex, namely Sweden and the Baltic countries of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania.
Labour Migration, Crisis and Cohesion in Eastern Europe
Charles Woolfson, Professor Emeritus
This project focuses specifically on labour migration from the Baltic new member states in terms of challenges it offers to social cohesion and longer-term prospects for social development in the context of the continuing aftermath of economic recession and the global economic and financial crisis. The project analyses the intersection of global economic recession with the underlying crisis of neo-liberalism in a new European Union member state, Baltic Lithuania. It ethnographically charts the disappointment of expectations occasioned by the shock of crisis for the citizens of a post-communist society. Resulting social unrest and the fragmentation of social solidarities are depicted through an analysis of “voice”, as expressed in “discourses of discontent”. It is suggested that the failure of the political process to acknowledge these popular discourses, and the muting of popular political protest via increasingly repressive public order policing has led to an outward “exit” of labor migration on an unprecedented scale, as well as the concerning possibility of “internal exit” in the form of xenophobia, populism and racism.