Empires we lose: why an English woman in Boston has nowhere to go
Following Latvian migrants to Boston, Lincolnshire, I met Zhenya, a Russian-speaking man who referred to himself as someone with migration in his blood. Zhenya came to Boston in 2004. He spoke good English and was once praised for doing so by an English woman who said: “You can pick up and leave, go back to your country if things here are not good, but we don’t have anywhere else go to.” This talk is an anthropological and historical interpretation of the woman’s lament that she does not have “anywhere else to go.” I show how studying Latvian mobility in relation to the actual and imagined immobility of the disintegrating working class in the East Midlands and North England enables analysis of the spatial distribution of labour, dispossession, and the good life in a post-Cold War imperial landscape.
Date: 17 October 2024, 15:30 (Thursday, 1st week, Michaelmas 2024)
Venue: Kellogg College, 62 Banbury Road OX2 6PN
Venue Details: Mawby Room (wheelchair accessible)
Speaker: Dace Dzenovska (University of Oxford)
Organising department: Centre on Migration, Policy and Society (COMPAS)
Organiser: Dace Dzenovska (University of Oxford)
Organiser contact email address: info@compas.ox.ac.uk
Part of: Perspectives of Place
Booking required?: Not required
Booking url: https://www.compas.ox.ac.uk/event/perspectives-of-place
Cost: Free
Audience: Public
Editor: Nathan Grassi