Migration, race and whiteness: what can we learn from studying post-Soviet migration?

Seminar will run from 1pm-2.30. Buffet lunch from 12.30 for networking.

Migration, race and whiteness: what can we learn from studying post-Soviet migration?
Theories of race and racism are remarkably absent from mainstream migration studies. Migrants are predominantly seen as having no relation to the structures of race and racial capitalism, often understood, instead, in terms of individualized lack. In this talk, I bring research on migration and race in conversation to explore how migration and racialisation are co-constituted, and why race is crucial in understanding of who is defined as a “European”, a “migrant”, an “(un)deserving” welfare claimant and a “refugee”. I am particularly interested in examining how for some migrants, gaining precarious entry into whiteness requires the renouncement of Blackness and the reinforcement of the racialised (b)order. My talk draws on several examples from my ethnographic fieldwork among Russian and Ukrainian migrant workers in Helsinki and Warsaw to locate post-Soviet migration within broader theoretical discussion on the relationship between migration, (East) European whiteness, European colonial projects, and gendered racial economy.

Speaker Bio:

Dr Daria Krivinos' work is the question of how race, class, and gender are revised and remade in the contexts of East-West migration, and how global and local processes of racialisation produce valued and devalued categories of workers. Their research has examined young post-Soviet migrants’ “claims to whiteness” en route to the imagined “West”, and the commodified inclusion in the low-paid gendered racial economy. In their work, they locate postsocialist migration and “Eastern Europe” in the global racial orders to analyse racialised subjects' own active participation in sustaining racial hierarchies as they try to fashion themselves as Europeans 'proper'.