Paper: Central and Eastern European migrant workers in refugee and migrant services in Austria

Paper details

Paper authors Ildikó Zakariás
In panel on Humanitarianism and Inequality
Paper presenter(s) will be presenting In-Person / Online

Abstract

The paper aims to investigate a specific aspect of refugee migration from Africa and the Middle East to Western Europe, acknowledging its relationship to some forms of intra-European Union mobility. More specifically, the arrival of refugees in the last decades have resulted in increased need for labour force in refugee and migrant services in various Western countries; also, it resulted in the increasing number of employees and volunteers in these institutions having themselves a ’migrant background’, often arriving from Central and Eastern European countries (Bauder-Jayaraman 2014, Zakariás-Feischmidt 2021). Conflicting political perspectives at national as well as European Union levels generate an unequal access to rights and resources for these people - called a system of ‘differential inclusions’ by Genova et al (2015). The paper aims to explore how migrants becoming ‘hosts’ of other migrants as teachers, trainers, social workers, counselors in migrant and refugee services may affect such discourses and narratives of differential inclusion: how do ideas on solidarity and rejection, on responsibility and security, on inclusion and exclusion become reconfigured, recreated or altered, when both ‘hosts’ and those arriving have experience, biographies and identities related to migration and transnational movement.

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Presenters

Ildikó Zakariás
Centre for Social Sciences, Bu...