Michal Šípoš
Current Project


Michal Šípoš

Curriculum Vitae

Current Project
Disrupture, Reconstruction, and Precarious Place:
A Transit Country Inversed.

Soon after 1989, the former socialist countries of Europe accepted an obligation to provide protection to people who seek asylum. This entailed formal acceptance of the 1951 Geneva Convention on the status of refugee, accompanied by the building of the wider infrastructures targeting forced migration. However, despite having access to various integration activities, in fact most of the refugees who arrive in the former socialist countries do not stay in Eastern Europe. It is highly probable that during various phases of the official asylum procedure, the majority of these people will attempt to on-emigrate to traditional destination areas that are located in the Western Europe. Consequently, in scientific and political discourses Eastern European countries are often labelled as transit areas.

My research interest targets seemingly simple questions: How does it come about that the presence of refugees in Eastern Europe is temporary and invisible? Is it really only because this area represents simply transit space? Or is it rather a combination of the precariousness of this place and their legal status that positions the lives of refugees out of local time and space? I would predict that the re-establishment of a new cycle of continuity in migrants' lives, which is obviously an uneasy process, is to a great extent dependent on local social organisation and availability of resources, as well as the way and the degree to which both the new environment, and the asylum seekers themselves, can be seen to be rooted-in- local time and history.
During my anthropological fieldwork I intend to co-operate with refugees from Chechnya who live in the Polish town of Lublin. Emigration of people from Chechnya is an outcome of tragic and lengthy conflict in Northern Caucasus. On the other hand, the Lubelski region represents a locality that itself has a precarious history of wars, ethnic conflicts, and genocide. Moreover, because of complicated contemporary economic situation many people leave this city and attempt to find employment abroad. In this sense, both in real and more metaphorical sense, nowadays Lublin is both a destination for asylum seekers, and a place from which asylum has been sought, and within which enormous disrupture has taken place in the past.

In order to explore the ways that refugee experience, and attempt to remake their lives in this particular locality, the project will draw upon and critically elaborate theoretical concepts such as resistance, temporality, and memory, with reference to both social anthropology and social history. My ethnographic approach will, however, involve primary focus on
Lublin
individual life paths of people who have experienced a critical event in their lives. I understand the life course as a process that consists of individual relations on contingencies that have occurred over peoples' lives and the lives of their relatives. A critical event is dramatic moment in a life course, often a reflection or expression of wider political, economic or social upheaval, that is followed by certain new modes of action and by redefinition of previous categories. Drawing on these ideas, my research sets out to answer the following questions:
  • When the old cycle of continuity in a life course changes dramatically as a result of war and forced migration, what is the impact of this on refugees' new lives in the new place?
  • How do refugees in Lublin reconstruct and sustain a new cycle of continuity in a context of local institutionally, economically and historically generated insecurities or, indeed are they able to do so?