The project: Social remittances of (re)migrants for society welfare grow: challenges and experiences in comparative perspective (REMIT)
The project is coordinated by the Center for Social Anthropology (Vytautas Magnus University).
The start of the project: 2020
The end of the project: 2022
Lithuania and other post-socialist countries, such as Poland and Croatia, have lost a significant part of its inhabitants due to emigration. Most often they are young, well-educated and active people and countries of origin suffer from declining labour, brain drain, ageing populations, and so on. However, the positive rob of (re) migrants for their home countries welfare has gradually been reemphasised over the last decade. The project builds on a relatively under-researched inCentral East Europe theoretical perspective of social remittances. The project aims to perform a complex analysis of (re)migrant’s social remittances for home counties welfare by identifying their expression modes, challenges and experience in post-socialist context.
The tasks of the project:
1. To develop a theoretical approach and methodology for (re)migrants’ social remittance research, which could be applied to iterative and international comparative research;
2.To identify social remittances practice: actors, forms, processes, effects on the values and daily behaviour of the home countries’ people;
3. To investigate the impact of social remittances on the public, private and non-governmental sectors by examining a role of public and NGOs’ program! in mobilizing the contribution of diaspora and (re)migrants;
4. To identify the factors of the forms and transfer process of (re)migrant social remittances;
5. To examine the links between (re)migrants’ identities, moral stances, values, emotions and social remittances activity;
6. To analyse the role of public space and (re)migrant social media discourses in the process of transfer of social remittances;
7. To make recommendations of (re)migrants inclusion for the policy makers.
The project uses methods of qualitative in-depth interviews, focus groups and discourse analysis. Research results will be presented in research articles (in Lithuanian and in English), in separate volume and at the international conferences. It will help to fill the research gap in this topic in post-socialist countries, will build methodological and empirical foundation for systematic research and will contribute to scholarly discussions internationally. The project will also facilitate diaspora’s engagement in home country’s policies of welfare society development.