The Migration Research Group has rescheduled the lecture by CEU alumna Neda Deneva (Senior Researcher at Babeș-Bolyai University, Cluj, Romania).
Abstract / "The COVID-19 pandemic exposed the structural inequalities and the dual position that temporary migrants occupy in Western Europe. Drawing on the case of Eastern European workers in the European Union, I trace the conflict between the need for essential workers and the threat of mobile people. I explore the tension between labour and citizenship, by showing the models of differential inclusion through labour and of exclusion from the social support that temporary migrants experience. By analysing cases of temporary workers in agriculture, the meat industry, and the informal labour in other spheres, I look at the emerging “conflict of bodies.” On the one hand, the significant bodies of the citizens need to be reproduced by the labour of the migrant workers and, at the same time, protected from the pandemic threat. On the other hand, the bodies of the workers, which are key for this reproduction, are dangerous and, despite their key role, are being treated as insignificant and easily replaceable.”
Bio / Neda Deneva holds a PhD in sociology and social anthropology from CEU. She works on transnational migration, transformations of labour and citizenship practices and regimes in the EU, care work, and transnationalization of the family. Empirically, she has worked on Bulgaria and Romania. She is currently a senior researcher at Babes-Bolyai University, Cluj, Romania for the project PRECWORK where she studies how re-industrialization enables a process of re-proletarianization of the Romanian Roma in Maramures and affects their productive and reproductive strategies, their relation to non-Roma, and their identification as workers and citizens.