Beyond the economic: migration as moral navigation in the post-Soviet space

当今世界移徙进程的一个关键特征体现在流动性的矛盾之中。随着资本、信息、思想和美好生活的形象的流通增加，改变了世界许多角落的期望范围（Chu 2010; Gaibazzi 2015; Schielke 2020），日益严重的不平等，加上日益严格的流动制度，使许多人无法合法可行的流动模式。在这种背景下，移民通常被描绘成恶棍或受害者，关于“危机”的公开叙述加强了流动的安全化。将移民苦难身体置于分析的中心，最近的大部分移民奖学金福尔斯都属于“苦难槽人类学”（Robbins 2013），这使得除了关注揭露边境政权的暴力之外，几乎没有空间探索人们的多重动机和流动经历（Rozakou 2019）。考虑到这一点，通过对塔吉克斯坦-世界上最依赖汇款的国家之一-最近大规模移徙到俄罗斯城市的案例研究，我在这个奖学金下工作的目的是超越“绝望的分析”（艾略特2020）-一个认识论的假设，它主要是贫困和结构性暴力的力量，在全球流动的核心，南。这个项目是基于我的博士研究，其中，植根于民族志实地考察与塔吉克斯坦移民和他们的家庭，研究了大规模移民到俄罗斯的动态超出了后社会主义结构调整造成的经济剥夺的框架。人种学，我的论文着眼于不同的方式，人们导航是什么意思是一个“好人”，并有一个“美好的生活”的背景下，不断变化的现实移民规则，不稳定的劳动条件，法律的和社会建设（非法）的合法性，和公民身份制度。从分析上讲，它提出的论点是，有必要解开移民的物质，想象力和道德方面之间的复杂关系，以了解当代移民运动的范围，速度和突出性。它表明，移徙决定远非对一般经济和政治崩溃的“自动”反应，而是嵌入当地价值体系，并嵌入在一个地方的生活和想象现在和未来的经验中，由多层次的流动历史构成，在那里，苏联现代化项目所带来的空间和社会变革为人们提供了目前的社会形式和类别。在我的博士学位的基础上，我将在奖学金期间产生的主要学术成果-一本专著和一篇学术文章的草稿-将进一步推进我的论点，将我的研究结果与关于不同地理和社会政治背景下的移徙和流动的更广泛的文献进行对话。作为世界上第三大移民接收国，俄罗斯的移民仍然是全球移民和流动研究的边缘话题，主要集中在欧洲和美国。我的工作旨在克服这种边缘性，同时也超越了后社会主义研究的区域和主题孤立。在与学术界以外的更广泛的受众接触方面，我在这个奖学金下的工作将挑战移民的公共代表性，这在移民的刑事化或非法化之间摇摆不定。接触移民权利活动家，非政府组织和媒体，并从广泛的非学术界获得反馈，将帮助我确定进一步的影响和潜在的合作机会。最后，奖学金将为我提供一个机会，进一步追求我的研究兴趣，为支持早期职业研究人员的第一个完全独立的项目的资助机构制定建议。

A key feature of contemporary migration processes worldwide is encapsulated in the paradox of mobility. As the increased circulation of capital, information, ideas and images of a better life had changed the horizon of expectations in many corners of the world (Chu 2010; Gaibazzi 2015; Schielke 2020), growing inequality, coupled with increasingly restrictive mobility regimes, exclude many people from legally viable modes of mobility. Against this backdrop, migrants are usually portrayed as either villains or victims, with public narratives about 'crisis' reinforcing the securitization of movement. Placing a migrant suffering body at the centre of analysis, much of recent migration scholarship falls under the 'suffering slot anthropology' (Robbins 2013), which leaves little space for the exploration of multiplicity of people's motivations for and experiences of mobility beyond the focus on exposing the violence of border regimes (Rozakou 2019). With this in mind, through the case study of recent mass migration from Tajikistan, one of the most remittance-dependent countries in the world, to Russian cities, the aim of my work under this Fellowship is to move beyond the 'analytic of desperation' (Elliot 2020) - an epistemological assumption that it is predominantly the forces of poverty and structural violence that lie at heart of mobility in the Global South.This project is based on my PhD research, which, rooted in ethnographic fieldwork with Tajikistani migrants and their families, examined the dynamic of mass migration to Russia beyond the framework of economic dispossession resulting from post-socialist restructuring. Ethnographically, my thesis looked at different ways in which people navigated what it means to be a 'good person' and to have a 'good life' in the context of the constantly shifting realities of migration rules, precarious labour conditions, legal and social constructions of (il)legality, and citizenship regimes. Analytically, it advanced the argument that it is necessary to unpack the complex relationship between the material, imaginative, and moral aspects of migration in order to understand the scope, speed, and salience of contemporary migratory movements. It showed that, far from being an 'automatic' response to general economic and political breakdown, migration decisions are inserted in local systems of value, and embedded in the experiences of living and imagining one's present and future in a place, constituted by the multi-layered histories of mobilities, where present forms of sociality and categories of person are informed by spatial and social transformations brought about by the Soviet modernisation project.Building on my PhD, the main academic outputs I will produce during the Fellowship - the draft of a monograph and an academic article - will further advance my argument by putting my findings in dialogue with broader literature on migration and mobility in different geographical and socio-political contexts. As the third highest migrant receiving country in the world, migration in Russia is still rather a marginal topic in global migration and mobilities studies, which mostly focus on Europe and the US. My work aims at overcoming this marginality, while also moving beyond the regional and thematic isolation of the studies of post-socialism. In terms of engagement with wider audiences outside academia, my work under this Fellowship will challenge the public representations of migration, which oscillate between criminalisation or victimisation of migrants. Reaching out to migrant rights activists, NGOs and media, and receiving feedback from a wide range of non-academics will help me identify further opportunities for impact and potential collaborations. Finally, the Fellowship will provide me with an opportunity to further pursue my research interests by developing proposals for the funding bodies that support early career researchers with their first fully independent projects.