This presentation discusses the meanings of rootedness in their relation to movements to and from the Southern Albanian villages. It questions how the emigrants ‘originating’ from Himarë/Himara, Southern Albania, through their continuous returning to their natal villages and their pilgrimage to Stavridi constitute their feelings of locality and rootedness to the place of their natal 'origin'. The pilgrimage to Stavridi and their return movements are seen as tropes of a route with its temporal and spatial implications related to the emigrant's claims for roots and locality. In today's shifting economic and political relations, the meaning of locality relates to a group's sense of rootedness in a particular location as well as to continuous movements and migrations. The presentation argues that in the villages of southern Albania ideals of locality celebrate ‘rootedness’ and gives the emigrants a feeling of emplacement in the village as the place shaped by movements and migrations.
B.03 Paper at an international scientific conference
COBISS.SI-ID: 34752301This paper explores peoples’ conceptualisations of transition and movement to a better future in the postcommunist Albania. It is based on several years of fieldwork in Albania and argues that in peoples’ daily discourse the concept of transition is often described as the lingering osciliation between uncertainty and hope upon which the imaginaries for economic and socially more stable future are constructed. This future is often envisioned as the accession to the European Union. The paper also sheds light on how people in their daily lives and narratives envision EU and its enlargement and how they generate political agendas of EU accesion.
B.03 Paper at an international scientific conference
COBISS.SI-ID: 34550317The paper questions how local people of Himarë/Himara, Southern Albania and emigrants who live in Greece and keep returning almost every year to their natal villages of Himarë/Himara constitute their area as an 'independent' region and strive to place it in 'Europe', represented by the European Union and thought of as a cluster of ‘Western’ European countries. The emigrants’ continuing returns to Himarë/Himara and their pilgrimage to Stavridi are a constitutive and constituting processes through which they negotiate their social boundaries and construct the porosity of the Albanian-Greek border.
B.03 Paper at an international scientific conference
COBISS.SI-ID: 32324653Guest lectures at the Aleksanteri Institute, University of Helsinki, discusses their role and meaning through the material flows between women migrants from Dhërmi/Drimades and their husbands who stay behind in their natal village in southern Albania. Material flows are not only emblems but also agents of migrant worlds as they contribute to the formation of transnational marriages that are necessary for the construction of material flows. Material flows form a part of reciprocal relations as they preserve and reconstruct marriage and social relationships in general. They act as insurance policies and reassure dwelling and dynamic presence of absent women migrants.
B.04 Guest lecture
COBISS.SI-ID: 35049005Lectures at the seminar "Migration in Europe: New Dimensions, Interdisciplinary Approaches, Plural Perspectives" at the University of Stavanger. The guest lecture questions how emigrants who live in Greece and keep returning almost every year to their natal village in Himarë/Himara, Suthern Albania, constitute their claims of being 'rooted' to the place of their natal origin.
B.04 Guest lecture
COBISS.SI-ID: 31911469