Permissions : This work is protected by copyright and may be linked to without seeking permission. Permission must be received for subsequent distribution in print or electronically. Please contact mpub-help umich. For more information, read Michigan Publishing's access and usage policy. Members include scholars from a range of disciplines, who are working on questions of culture, power and social change in former socialist settings.
Organizers Alaina Lemon anthropology and Michele Rivkin-Fish visiting assistant professor in Health Behavior and Health Education selected 25 papers out of the that were submitted, and organized them into seven panels.
Her presentation will be published in a forthcoming volume entitled, Postsocialisms, edited by C. The following remarks were presented by Sascha Goluboff visiting assistant professor of cultural anthropology, Washington and Lee University , who served as a discussant on the panel, " Mobility, Labor, and Ties than Bind. The mythic charter for belonging in the Czech Republic is collective suffering, and those who left as heroes to fight against communism abroad are now seen by new Czech citizens as "plundering opportunists," whose real motivation in leaving was to find material comforts.
As a result, the returnees have no legal or material claims to Czech citizenship. This situation elucidates how post-socialist states reformulate the dichotomy between socialism and capitalism as they reorient themselves after the collapse of the Soviet Union. As Michael Burawoy and Katherine Verdery suggest , "local improvisations… may either press either in novel directions or toward a 'return' to socialism.
Citizens of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union have to negotiate their way through this jumble of communal values and personal needs, and this panel shows us that one key way to do this is through migration, what Armine Ishkanian calls "a transnational survival strategy" The papers discuss the reasons for emigration and the implications these decisions have for the migrants themselves and the countries and families they left behind either temporarily or permanently.
