Project title: Migrants’ life courses: dealing with uncertain, highly destandardized biographies in Romania
Duration: august 2016- iulie 2018
Funding: This work was supported by a grant of the Romanian National Authority for Scientific Research and Innovation, CNCS/CCCDI – UEFISCDI, project number PN-III-P4-ID-ERC- 2016-0005 within PNCDI III
Project description:
During its postsocialist history, Romania witnessed successive waves of economic migration by its citizens, men and women, both from rural and urban areas, and with different social and ethnic backgrounds. The massive economic outmigration places Romanians among the most mobile Europeans and brings about important changes in migrants’ life courses, as well as in the socio-economic and cultural landscape of their home country which needs to design and implement institutional welfare responses to accommodate the growing diversity of migrants’ biographies.
The project aims to raise awareness about the increasing necessity to document the changes affecting individuals’ biographies especially in postsocialist Romania where migration altered men’s and women’s life courses to a high extent, whereas social institutions changes do not reflect and adapt at the same pace. The discomfort, uncertainties and troubles migrants, men and women, of different ethnic belonging, may witness after a long period of living and working abroad, sometimes with undocumented interspersed spells, need to be thoroughly considered by researchers, in order to inform sound policies to deal with destandardized biographies and to cushion the effects of their ruptured work trajectories and surreptitious life transitions.
The project will employ life course perspective and will take on gender as cross-cutting approach in seeking to explore the patterns of gendered life course patterns of migrants with at least 5 years of living experience outside their origin country. Qualitative and quantitative methods will be used in order to map the diversity of life course patterns occurring in migrants’ sample. Life stories of 40 sampled participants will be conducted in Romania with migrants and returnees from most important destination countries (e.g. Italy, U.K., Germany). The purposeful sampling will ensure a great variation with respect to characteristics such as education, age, gender and ethnicity.
Contact:
ionela.vlase@ulbsibiu.ro
PHOTO OF THE TEAM : SIBIU, 2016
