This conference brought together around 30 participants from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds to discuss several topical issues, namely the “conflicts around European Union citizenship and the right to free movement as part of a highly stratified and contested system of legal statuses and practices within unequal EU-european spaces.”1 Lisa Riedner and Polina Manolova stressed in their opening remarks how there are variegated histories and realities with regard to mobility and migration regimes within the EU, and that much more connections need to be made between critical social theory and empirical research on underprivileged mobilities.

The first panel highlighted some issues commonly discussed at an intersubjective level as part of larger structural systems of inequality. For example, ALEKSANDRA LEWICKI (Brighton) discussed how forms of racialization became salient in post-Brexit Britain on the level of institutional actors and labour market structures. She reconstructed the positionality of so-called “Eastern European” and how it corresponds with three different discursive tropes and connected institutional trajectories: the blaming for the spread of disease during the Covid 19 pandemic, the accusation of straining public services and the criminalization as tricksters and traffickers. These function, in effect, as a reinforcement of the precarization of labour, a politics of austerity and the fortification of borders.

Looking at the United Kingdom as well, but opening up from a critical perspective on gendered biographies was SIMONE VARRIALE (Lincoln). His case study on Italian migrants in the UK after the financial crisis in 2008 unearthed a plethora of ways how social class is able to travel and recompose between contexts, depending on the embodiment of gendered and racialized structures of inequality. His contribution aimed to complicate and further our understanding of how skills and precarization are negotiated.

MILENA BŁAHUTA (Warsaw) highlighted another understudied aspect of intra-EU mobility. Her research centered Polish emigrants in Central Eastern European countries, who are situated in a somewhat liminal space that is not considered East or West, South or North, center or periphery. Presented with quite different opportunity structures than in “the West”, other imaginaries are invoked in biographical storytelling about these transregional connections, which Błahuta analyzed through a postcolonial lens. The contributions of this panel showed how complex and simultaneously important the discussions around racialization and conceptions of “whiteness” are to a current and historical understanding of structural inequalities around mobility.2 Understanding the linkages between biography and (socio-economic and political) structure proved quite interesting and intriguing to explore. Yet we do need to be cautious against tendencies of a methodological nationalism and how the nation state is still often presupposed as the relevant context for political imaginaries or taken as a starting point for inquiry without question.

The second panel focused on social reproduction in crisis and in several contributions reflected well on the aforementioned critique of a methodological nationalism. For example, JANA FINGAROVA (Frankfurt am Main) traced the portability of social security rights across and through European spaces, following Bulgarian families in their attempts to access various social infrastructures. Her multi-sited framework revealed barriers in accessing health care or receiving family benefits as well as different articulations of agency, which range from subordination to learned assertiveness to empowerment.

MIRIAM NESSLER (Dortmund) centered an urban perspective in her work about living conditions and arrival infrastructures for Romanian migrants in Magdeburg, yet linked these to the multiple scales of political regulation presently shaping conditions on the ground. Through this, she was able to show how socio-spatial conditions of overcrowded housing reproduce inequalities and stigmatizations of intra-EU mobile citizens.

VESELA KOVACHEVA (Hamburg), in looking at the case of Hamburg and the (non-)assistance structures for vulnerable groups, added to this discussion of precarious housing regarding intra-EU mobility. She made clear that some local responses to the needs of homeless persons provide some inclusion, but return policies as well as national limitations to welfare provisions produce insecurity and uncertainty.3 All these contributions, in one way or another, display the importance of struggles around and access to social infrastructures on an urban scale, as dwellers of the city and regardless of status. Some scholars introduced the notion of urban citizenship against the prevalent idea of national citizenship to offer a better understanding of such an urban future.4

Another distinctly spatial perspective on the crisis of social reproduction was put forth by MARK BERGFELD (Brussels). He fittingly criticized that migration as a factor in capitalist social relations is sometimes underdeveloped within literature on social reproduction. Looking at how core EU-states have attempted to mitigate some impacts of the so-called care crisis, Bergfeld discussed forms of capital-product fixes, state fixes as well as spatial fixes: this means to translocate ageing populations and more importantly, growing the care labour pool through schemes of transnational care work. Although the talk was instructive, I would claim that there is a need for a more nuanced analysis of positionalities and interests of state and non-state actors within these schemes, as well as a geographically informed reading of the concept of spatial fix and fixity, as I have argued elsewhere.5

Some of these questions around techno-spatial fixes to labour problems were also highlighted during the third and final panel. Most prominently, MIRA WALLIS (Berlin) presented her research on digital gig workers in Germany and Romania. She connected their experience to the notion of “virtual migration”6 to show how workers’ bodies stay put while their labour power and skills are mobilized. Through this, a labour force emerges within digital capitalism that is cheap, easily scalable, temporarily flexible and culturally heterogeneous.

While it seems obvious that in some sectors of the economy, digital gig work will continue to grow, it should be noted that mobile labour remains essential in other areas that will continue to rely on physical labour. The other contributors of the panel presented two of these examples: PETER BIRKE (Göttingen) highlighted the shifting regulation regarding subcontracting and temporary labour in the German meat industry. During the Covid pandemic, there was a highly publicized scandal around the working and living conditions of Eastern European workers after a series of severe outbreaks. Birke stressed that the regulatory changes mustn’t be understood solely as a top-down response to this public debate, but rather may be read as a response to migrant resistance and pressure. Yet, the multiplicity of precariousness allowed for a recomposition of the labour force by the employers which calls for an intersectional analysis of the multiplicities of inequality.

HANNA SCHLING (London) added two very important aspects to the discussion on the composition of labour and labours’ potential to struggle: First, she looked at labour market intermediaries and conceptualized them as a central migration infrastructure. Second, she showed how these temporary work agencies not only organize the labour supply, but also attempt to control workers’ social reproduction by providing private dormitories. This input should caution us to look beyond the workplace as a site of control of labour and struggle, and consider more in how far means of social reproduction become implicated in im/mobilizing labour.

Overall, this conference did not leave much to be desired. One particular strength of the conference was that it brought together researchers with activist and civil society organizations, some of which were given space to introduce themselves and network amongst themselves and the participants. This illustrates the need for an involved and participatory research agenda when academics examine the conditions of precarious labour and social reproduction. The context of intra-EU migration and mobility remains one that is shaped by variegated structures of power and inequality. To study some of these, I again would like to caution against reproducing containerized ideas of nation states as the all-encompassing spatial formation of political power, but rather look closely at the multiple scales at play within these regimes of migration, labour and social reproduction. Lastly, I would posit that amidst the manifold presentations with a strong empirical focus, there needs to be space for future discussions on theoretical and conceptual exchange. Some of the different theoretical and disciplinary backgrounds represented at this conference may attempt to engage more with each other to further our understanding of where we are coming from and where we need to go in the quest of a more just Europe, with freedom of movement for all.

Conference overview:

Panel 1: Politics, imaginaries and intersecting inequalities between East and West

Aleksandra Lewicki (Brighton): The racialization of “Eastern Europeans”: the (re)making of a category and structural inequalities in Europe

Simone Varriale (Lincoln): Precarious teachers and superstar engineers: coloniality and gendered precarisation in post-2008 Italian migration

Manès Weisskircher (Oslo), Mariana S. Mendes (Dresden), Julia Rone (Cambridge), Anna Kyriazi (Milan): The politics of emigration: a research agenda on the political impact and differentiated politicization of emigration in the EU

Milena Błahuta (Warsaw): East-East migrations? Trans-(semi)peripheral mobility in post-socialist EU

Panel 2: Social reproduction in crisis: socio-spatial articulations and strategies

Miriam Nessler (Dortmund): Overcrowding in Magdeburg, urban and housing regimes

Vesela Kovacheva (Hamburg): Approaches of inclusion and exclusion to EU migrants in need for assistance: results from an empirical study in Hamburg

Jana Fingarova (Frankfurt am Main): Bulgarian mobile families between subordination and empowerment

Mark Bergfeld (Brussels): State “fixes” and migrant responses to the crisis of social reproduction

Panel 3: Labour struggles: contested geographies of in situ and digital work

Mira Wallis (Berlin): Digital labour, mobility and social Reproduction: crowdwork in/between Germany and Romania

Peter Birke (Göttingen): Migration and labor unrest in the German meat industry

Hanna Schling (London): Reproducing conditional presence: internal borders in the dormitory labour regime

Mapping the field and ideas for future collaborations

General discussion and wrap up

Notes:
1 Website of the Freedom of Movement research network, http://eumignet.de (25.2.2022).
2 Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish became white, New York u.a. 1995; Hans-Christian Petersen / Jannis Panagiotidis, Rassismus gegen Weiße? Für eine Osterweiterung der deutschen Rassismusdebatte, 2022, https://geschichtedergegenwart.ch/rassismus-gegen-weisse-fuer-eine-osterweiterung-der-deutschen-rassismusdebatte/ (10.3.2022).
3 Similar results have been shown in a study about the situation of homeless EU-citizens in Frankfurt am Main, see Lisa Riedner / Marie-Therese Haj Ahmad, Bedarfsanalyse wohnungsloser EU-Bürger:innen in Frankfurt am Main, Amt für multikulturelle Angelegenheiten (Hrsg.) 2020, https://www.amka.de/sites/default/files/2020-11/Bedarfsanalyse_wohnungsloser_EU-Buerger_innen_in_Frankfurt_am_Main.pdf (16.3.2022).
4 Mathias Rodatz, Migration ist in dieser Stadt eine Tatsache. Urban politics of citizenship in der neoliberalen Stadt, in: sub\ urban. zeitschrift für kritische stadtforschung 2 (2014), S. 35–58.
5 Jan Kordes, Anwerbeprogramme in der Pflege. Migrationspolitiken als räumliche Bearbeitungsweise der Krise sozialer Reproduktion, in: PROKLA. Zeitschrift für kritische Sozialwissenschaft 49 (2019), S. 551–567.
6 Aneesh Aneesh, Virtual Migration: The Programming of Globalization, Durham 2006.