Belonging in Kurbet? A comparative analysis of constructing the “Albanian immigrant” in British and Greek media – Dimitra Gkitsa

After the collapse of socialist regime in Albania in 1990, thousands of Albanians were forced to find new homes in “migrant places”, or in kurbet, to use the Albanian word for migration. In Greece, Albanian immigrants constitute the largest migrant community (approximately 5% of the total population). More than thirty years after the first flow of Albanian migrants, Albanians are still victims of discrimination in Greece. Mass media has played its peculiar role in producing and re-producing racist narratives. Growing up as a child of Albanian migrants in Greece, I experienced first hand how those media narratives affect not only the construction of the “Albanian immigrant”, but also the ways in which Albanians themselves are forced to remember their past and to assess their identities in the public space.

Recently, there has been an increase of xenophobia directed to the Albanian immigrants in the United Kingdom, with many researchers arguing that this is a direct outcome of Brexit politics (Lea Ypi, 2022; Andi Hoxhaj, 2022). Interestingly, and although the context is different, the narrative followed by British media is very similar to that of Greek media (for instance, the socialist past approached in terms of backwardness and “uncivilised” identity, criminalisation, references to remittances that Albanians send to relatives in their home country).

Albanian migration is haunted by an accumulation of multiple traumas—surviving an authoritarian regime, witnessing the collapse of communism and the sudden shift to a neoliberal reality, feeling “unwelcomed” in other countries, desiring an EU citizenship. How is the sense of identity and belonging developed in migration? More crucially, what is the role of mass media in this process? This paper proposes to build a comparative analysis between the representation of the “Albanian immigrant” in Greek and the post-Brexit British media to examine the ways in which media narratives intertwine with issues related to identity, belonging, and collective memory in migrant communities.

Hierarchies of EUropeans: Memory and Migration in British Media Representations of Germany and Poland – Charlotte Galpin and Maren Rohe

In this paper, we use narrative analysis to analyse how representations of history and migration interact to create very different images of Poland and Germany that are shaped by post-socialist and post-war memory. Polish migrants are constructed as a mass of manual workers, as victims, or as an ethnic minority. By contrast, German migrants are typically portrayed as highly skilled and easily integrated, except for black or minority ethnic German migrants who appear as problematic. It has been argued, however, that media coverage has divorced Polish migration from the driving force of post-communist transition (Drzewiecka et al., 2014, p. 416). Similarly, German migrants are portrayed primarily as Western European and rendering invisible those from the former East. We show how “memory” narratives of German and Polish history are told separately from the migration narratives. Both German and Polish history is narrated with a heavy focus on World War II: Germany is portrayed as perpetrator, while Poland is portrayed as victim. Narratives of the Cold War partly portray Poles as victims who had to be freed by the Western world, this time with Russia as the aggressor, while GDR history is used to explain the rise of the radical right in eastern Germany. We argue that by considering narratives of different kinds of EU migrants alongside narratives of memory, we see how personal and collective memories are excluded from the narrative, robbing migrants of agency and important parts of their identity.

Towards a Postsocialist Politics of Presences  – Špela Drnovšek Zorko

In 2010, then-British Prime Minister Gordon Brown famously got himself into trouble following his interaction with an indignant voter, who demanded: “these Eastern Europeans what are coming in, where are they flocking from?” (Veličković 2019). In the intervening years, “Bigotgate” has become part of British political history, and the question of “Eastern European migrants” a commonsensical if partial explanation for increasingly hostile migration policies and sentiments, including Brexit. The question itself, however, remains curiously unaddressed. While the powerful cry “we are here because you were there” (Patel 2022) has come to symbolise a postcolonial politics of presence, there is no comparable historicity assumed in the contemporary presence of postsocialist migrants from the East of Europe – in contrast even to the experiences of Irish immigrants, whose presumed whiteness and racialised invisibility from the unmarked norm has otherwise offered a point of comparison (Hickman and Ryan 2020).

Drawing on long-term qualitative research with Central-East Europeans living in the UK, the paper challenges this omission by engaging with migrants’ own sense of “postness” (Drnovšek Zorko 2021). Based on my interlocutors’ narratives, I argue that a lack of knowledge (and presumed lack of interest) about the places where postsocialist Europeans are “flocking from” is in fact central to the often-fraught question of their relative position in postcolonial Britain. In this presentation, I put forth two principal ways in which “postsocialist” becomes a significant category of analysis for migrants from the region when making sense of their lives in the UK: in the use of “postsocialist” and “postcolonial” comparisons, and their boundaries; and in a growing generational awareness and mediated memory of “postsocialist” migrant children.