NewsroomStudy at DITResearchIndustry and InnovationLibraryServices and FacilitiesFaculties and Schools
Go
no file no file no file no file no file no file


Jacoba de Vries

Jacoba de Vries

P: +353-1-4027191
E: jacoba.devries@student.dit.ie
Campus: Aungier Street

Research Topic: Freedom of Movement from Below: Migrants from Latvia in Ireland

My planned visual ethnographic study of immigrants from Latvia in Ireland focuses on the lived consequences of the Latvian nationalisation policy and the complexities surrounding migrant’ construction of ‘home’. It focuses on Latvian and Russian speakers. In the years of the Soviet-occupation of Latvia, workers, mainly from Russia, Ukraine and Belarus emigrated to Latvia, stimulated by the Russification policy. Since the independence the status of ‘non-Latvians’ remains a central question in Latvian politics. These groups were not granted Latvian citizenship automatically and had to pass a Latvian language and history exam in order to become citizens. Latvian speakers who emigrated to other EU-countries are on their turn sometimes portrayed as ‘national traitors’ in the Latvian press. The Latvian government has made concerted efforts in 2008 to convince migrants to return to Latvia in anticipation of labour shortages in the market.

My study sets out to unravel the lived and material consequences of the Latvian nationalisation policy, rendering visible the everyday performative identity affiliations of migrants in Ireland from Latvia to different nation states. For according to Clifford (1998) the identity of migrants is never centred on a single location, but more a question of mediating multiple locations. Concepts of home in studies of transnationalism resonate with this reality, problematising conventional understandings of home as stable and spatially fixed locations. ‘Home may refer to ‘one’s country, city of town, where one’s family lives or comes from and/or where one usualy lives. It may be other places or relationsships. These homes hold differing symbolic meaning and salience.

As ‘the lived experience of migration is not always fully accessible through the limitations of textual and word-based knowledge’ (Grossman and O’Brien 2007: 2), and while notions of ‘home’ and practices of ‘homing’ are often emotionally loaded (Naficy 1999; Morley 2000; Ahmed et al. 2003), the combination of ethnography and audiovisual research (photography, video and multimedia) provides a complementary mixed-methods approach to my study.

I conducted ethnographic fieldwork among Russian Germans in the city of Lahr (Germany) and focused on identity in my MA thesis. After that I worked at the Dutch Ministry of Justice in different positions, before coming to Ireland in 2008.

top ^