Migrant Friendships in a Super-Diverse City

ibidem Press, Stuttgart

Acknowledgements

Foreword

Introduction

Chapter 1Limits of transnationalism

London: a super-diverse city

Russian-speaking migrants in London

Transnationalism: introducing a popular concept in migration studies

Who is a transmigrant?

Critique of transnationalism

Conclusions

Chapter 2Ethnicity and social relationships

Ethnicity and migration

Social relationships amongst migrants

The nature of friendship

(post) Soviet friendship

Conclusions

Chapter 3Localising friends

‘It just happens’

Looking for Russian-speakers

Expanding networks

Transnational friendships?

Conclusions

Chapter 4 Choosing friends

Degrees of closeness

Constructing distances among Russian-speakers in the bar

Divisions within the community

Affective distancing

Conclusions

Chapter 5Rethinking friends

Becoming cosmopolitan

Everyday diversity

Dynamics of change

Social contexts of cosmopolitanisation

‘Us’ and ‘Them’: questioning the dichotomy

Ambiguous images of ‘otherness’

Conclusions

Conclusion

Appendix 1: Data on research participants

Bibliography

Acknowledgements

Thanks to my friends, acquaintances, and colleagues who helped throughout the process of this book’s creation.

I am grateful to Alan Latham, James Kneale, Claire Dwyer, and Russell Hitchings for their invaluable academic guidance. Thanks to Tauri Tuvikene for being there to discuss the challenges and quandaries of this research among other things, and sharing good times at UCL while this work was in progress.

Special thanks to all my respondents without whose openness and sometimes even friendship I wouldn’t have completed this research.

Thanks to fellow researchers of Russian-speaking migrants for our fruitful discussions: Andy Byford and Olga Bronnikova.

I appreciate the efforts of ibidem-Verlag, especially Andreas Umland and Valerie Lange, who helped make this book physically happen.

I am also grateful to Max Anley for his attentive and sensitive editing of the text.

Thanks to my parents for their support.

Finally, a big thank you goes to Anton Shekhovtsov, for being an important source of motivation and inspiration.

Foreword

Friendships, so integral to everyday social life, have been largely neglected in social science. Perhaps they are so commonplace and so ordinary they have remained invisible in our search for understanding of how social lives are experienced. However, more recently geographers and others have begun to recognise the importance of paying analytical attention to friendship patterns and networks. While most attention has been placed on children’s and youth geographies, there has also been a recognition of the significance of friendship in migration studies. As Tim Bunnell et al. (2012: 502) have recently argued, a focus on friendship is important in ‘unsettling the prevailing emphasis on kin and neighbourhood in seeking to understand the geographies of transnational social life’, for, as this study illustrates so well, friendship networks are often the key elements through which contemporary experiences of migration, settlement, and transnational lives can be understood. We have long recognised the role of networks in migration studies―the links which facilitate chains of migration to particular destinations, or the strong bonds which develop between people with shared national backgrounds or migratory experiences in new places. However, we have tended to theorise these networks through the anthropological lens of kin or ethnicity or to prioritise versions of familial networks. This pioneering study brings a fresh analytical insight to the value of studying and analysing friendship networks.

Darya Malyutina’s study of Russian-speaking migrants in London puts their friendship networks centre stage. She argues that for this diverse group of young migrants in London tracing their friendships offers the most insight to understanding migration trajectories and contemporary transnational lives. This innovative focus on friendship is based upon an in-depth and insightful qualitative methodological approach which starts not, as previous studies might have done, in an ethnic club or religious organisation, but in a bar. This ethnographic starting point enables Malyutina to then build up a sample of Russian-speaking migrants with whom she builds up trust enabling them to share with her their friendship groups. Malyutina’s focus on friendship groups allows her to tease out some of the important conceptual themes which frame her analysis and provide an important critique of the existing limitations of transnational studies of migration.

By tracing the informal friendships which are central to the lives of her informants, Malyutina destablises some of the confirmed assumptions about the place of ethnicity in migration studies through a nuanced analysis of when and how shared language or national identities matter to her respondents, but also the significance of diverse friendship networks possible within the global city. Indeed, as she illustrates, cosmopolitanism emerges as an important value for her respondents which challenges a reliance on inter-ethnic friendship networks and suggests that wider friendships produce changing dispositions towards ethnic diversity. A focus on friendship networks also provides a much-needed empirical depth to wider work on transnationalism. By analysing the range of friendships which migrants retain, Malyutina is able both to map empirically, and emotionally, how transnational ties are retained and valued alongside an analysis which links the scales of the local and the transnational. Indeed, as she argues, friendship has the ‘potential of inspiring and informing mobility’. Her work is important in challenging an assumption of a priori transnational or ethnic links, instead using her innovative focus on friendships to establish the importance or insignificance of these links empirically. Her findings are important particularly for migration studies, but they also provide important insights into the ways in which contemporary urban sociality is lived and experienced. This suggests that ‘the local’ and ‘the global’ are interlinked in dynamic and sometimes unexpected ways.

This book concentrates on the experiences of a group of migrants to London who have remained largely invisible in migration scholarship and too often caricatured in the popular imagination as either property millionaires or benefit dependents. As Malyutina carefully delineates, Russian-speaking migrants are a significant demographic but cannot be easily defined as a distinct ‘ethnic community’ and are often simply elided within a pejorative characterisation of ‘East Europeans’. This study is therefore particularly important in illuminating the experience of a distinct group of relatively recent, and poorly understood, migrants to London. It also offers significant new directions for future migration research on new migration to ‘super-diverse’ cities like London which is attentive to diversity and does not rely on narrow framings of either ethnicity or transnationality.

Darya Malyutina has opened up a new strand of migration studies in this book not only in the detailed insights she gives into her own case study of Russian-speaking migrants but also by offering a distinctive approach, through the analysis of friendship networks, for many other scholars of transnationalism and migration.

Claire Dwyer

University College London

July 2015

Introduction

‘The milieu is not a refined one, but it is the only one that is acceptable. The Americans are kind, open‐hearted, cheerful people, helpful and optimistic, but completely alien. Friendship in the Russian sense with all its violent expressions of emotions, last shirts, quarrels, embraces, and tears is unimaginable here. Everything is based on different rules, on independence, on keeping yourself to yourself, on reserve and self‐absorption. The word and the notion “privacy”―that is, in a loose translation, “the private sphere”, is for the Americans sacred. It is a coat of armour with which they protect themselves from negative emotions’.

(Dovlatov, S. Private letter cited in Young 2009: 54)

What is the relationship between friendship and migration in the contemporary globalised society and a super-diverse city like London? To what extent do migrants’ close informal relationships correspond with commonalities (or differences) of origin, geographic location, cross-border connections, and history of mobility? It would clearly be misleading to say that belonging to a certain ‘migrant community’ amounts to belonging to a friendship network. Migrants’ social relations are not confined to relations between compatriots or migrants only. The constitution of a circle of personal connections and the degrees of personal closeness within that circle depend upon particular personal and structural conditions, as well as the circumstances that lead to migration, its temporal dynamics, and a change in spatial location.

The purpose of this book does not include working out a one-size-fits-all explanation of migrants’ friendships. It rather seeks to provide some concrete conclusions and contribute to explorations of the complex role of migrants’ friendships. In order to fulfil this aim, I asked myself (and my migrant research subjects) some simple questions: how, when, and why does being a migrant or belonging to the same ethnic or national ‘community’ matter for being friends with someone? Under which circumstances does it not matter if an individual belongs to a particular ‘community’ or not? Indeed, can you be friends with someone you call ‘completely alien’? Is it possible that ‘Russian friendship’ may not work with ‘others’?

This book is focused on recent Russian-speaking migrants from Russia and other post-Soviet countries living in London. The size of this population has increased since the break-up of the Soviet Union and has grown particularly rapidly since the beginning of the 21st century. Most of my respondents are relatively young, ‘middling’ migrants (Conradson and Latham 2005a; Knowles and Harper 2009), with a good command of English. Others are employed in low-skilled jobs, albeit not the most low-paid. They are not a particularly visible group in London or in the UK. Contrary to popular perception, most of the Russian-speakers who moved to London within the last 10 to 15 years are neither super-rich mansion-owners nor ‘benefit scroungers’. They are ‘ordinary’ people who exist somewhere in the middle. Indeed, while research on migration is often limited to studies of elites or lower social strata, London’s new populations include large numbers of those who live and work in between these extremes. These populations emerged in the process of London’s ongoing social, economic, and cultural development as a super-diverse multicultural city.

These groups pose a set of challenges for migration research. They are quite diverse and maintain local and cross-border connectivity in a variety of different ways. Like many researchers of contemporary East European migrants in the UK (Datta 2009; Garapich 2012; Morosanu 2013a; Rabikowska 2010), I was often faced with the occasionally contradictory social ties that migrants maintain with compatriots in London and across borders as well as their contested relationships with non-Russian-speaking Londoners. I found this recently emerged migrant population neither maintains any universal pattern of connectivity nor conforms to abstract notions of a diaspora or a transnational community. Therefore, there was a need to explore the particular social connections of its members in order to find out how migrants’ social networks may function, and how they may negotiate their way in a globalised world. I felt that existing explanations were not entirely sufficient. Behind people’s words and actions there is something else beyond ethnic solidarity, national identity, cultural background, kinship bonds, neighbourhood connections, unity on the grounds of the common vulnerability of a marginalised minority population, life in an expat ‘bubble’, or the universal connectivity of border-transcending postnational ties. Migrants’ social networks are diverse and dynamic, and the processes that lead to their establishment, sustain them or facilitate their dissolution are a critical but underexplored part of their sociality.

An exploration of these issues provides important insights for theoretical reflections on transnational migration and studies of ‘global cities’. Increased mobility and interconnectedness have been addressed in migration literature as significant features of globalisation. ‘Global cities’ are described as places with the highest concentration of flows of people, ideas, and capital. London in particular has been approached as a city with a socially, culturally, and ethnically diverse population due to enhanced migration, which itself contributes to changes in the social structure, the development of global interconnectedness, and the problematisation of relationships within everyday multiculture. Its super-diversity (Vertovec 2007b), expressed in the increased number of multidimensional differences both between and within new migrant groups in the UK, has also been causing concern in terms of questions of community relations, trust and integration (Vertovec 2010).

London’s population has undergone some dynamic changes in the past couple of decades, and the growth of East European migration in particular characterises new trends in its development. While post-accession migrants from East European countries that joined the European Union in the new century have already become an object of voluminous academic research, post-Soviet citizens who identify themselves as Russian-speakers have been the subject of considerably less attention. This book is based on the premise that research into Russian-speakers in London can enhance our current understanding of contemporary urban communities, social ties impacted upon by migration, and the quandaries of living within super-diversity. This research’s conceptual framework incorporates thematics that extend beyond a common focus on post-EU accession migrants from Eastern Europe, but draws upon wider migration research perspective, and is attuned to the specific issues which define migrant Russian-speakers’ experiences of friendship in super-diverse London.

Theoretically, this book contributes to the understanding of migrant social relationships by conceptualising friendship as manifesting dynamics and differences that retain some ethnic, national, and sociocultural embeddedness, yet cannot be fully accounted for by overarching explanations of kinship and common background. My work thus forms a part of geographical studies of friendship and its role in migration processes that has been developing recently (Bunnell et al. 2012; Conradson and Latham 2005a; Morosanu 2013; Ryan 2011). Friendship was chosen as a conceptual category through which this study could explore the dynamics of routine social interactions, long-term and new attachments, the constitutions of social networks, relationships between compatriots and non-compatriots, and the influence of these factors on migrants’ everyday lives in London. The focus on friendship involves concentrating on a relationship between individuals, and avoids the reductive understanding of migrant social ties as existing in isolated ethnic communities. This monograph targets four main themes concerning migration: transnationalism, ethnicity, cosmopolitanisation, and friendship. It contributes to migration studies by stressing the need to pay more attention to the inner diversity of migrant populations, the different structural and personal constraints which affect mobility decisions and future lives as migrants. It advances contemporary scholarship on migration, ethnicity, diversity, social groups and networks by filling in certain gaps in theoretical knowledge and providing much needed empirical evidence to support theoretical conceptualisations.

The first part of this study outlines conceptual approaches to migrant social relations. This part seeks to rethink the ways in which migrants are positioned within the fields of the transnational and the local, the ethnic and the non-ethnic. Chapter 1 suggests a way of looking at contemporary migration that goes beyond the diffuse treatment of transnationalism, where it is understood as the heightened cross-border connectivity resulting from enhanced means of communication and ease of travel. Transnational connectivity implies border-spanning links and interactions between people and institutions that may range from sustaining ties with local communities and families ‘back home’, the exchange of material resources, travel and communication (Levitt 2001), to political transnationalism, overlapping political memberships, and involvement in home country politics through such means as voting in elections or protest rallies (Bauböck 2003; Van Bochove 2012). Following the works of theorists who claim that with the development of migrant studies the notion of transnationalism is becoming generalised and loosely interpreted (Portes 2001; Smith 2005; Vertovec 1999), I suggest that the concept of transnationalism has to be approached with greater attention to the particular circumstances of migration, and consideration of the stratified and heterogeneous character of contemporary migrant communities. Different migratory situations may challenge and resist the development of postnational (Soysal 1994) or denationalised (Favell 2008) identities and practices. In brief, this chapter summarises scholarly discussion of hyper-connectivity, continuous and overlapping cross-border involvements and belonging, and the proclaimed decrease of national or ethnic affiliations as limited and contingent.

Chapter 2 concentrates on ethnicity and the de-ethnicisation of social ties, and develops ideas of relationships that might be based upon something more nuanced than migrant status and/or mutual ethnic or national affiliation. I draw upon researchers’ warnings against taking migrant communities for granted (Bunnell et al. 2012; Ryan et al. 2008; Wimmer and Glick Schiller 2003). This chapter builds upon demands to critically rethink migrant communities as groups (Brubaker 2004; Eriksen 2002) and focus on the relational aspect of migrant ethnicity, which encompasses the often simultaneous malleability of ethnic boundaries and the rigidity of concerns about the supposedly ethnic determinants of a social group’s qualities. Following the developing scholarship on East European migration which aims to distinguish ethnic ties from social connectivity, and critically disentangle the nuanced character of ethnicity as well as the different strengths, uses and values of social ties (Garapich 2012; Morosanu 2013a, 2013b; Ryan 2011), this study positions the idea of migrant sociality as not necessarily ethnic. It demonstrates that, while enhanced mobility does not necessarily lead to denationalisation, migrants should not be approached as groups with demarcated boundaries whose members primarily rely on those who are deemed their co-ethnics in their everyday lives. I emphasise that migrants’ relationships may include a much wider set of social ties than just ‘ethnic’ ones, while excluding connections with those considered to be compatriots and fellow migrants. Drawing upon these ideas, I introduce friendship as an optic for understanding migrant sociality that does not focus merely on transnational connections or ethnic ties. An analysis that concentrates on the actual relationships that people develop, sustain or cut off while living as a migrant can provide insights that inform the patterns of relationships across space and time. Friendship networks are relevant for migration research because they have important affective qualities, are not limited by bonds of kinship or neighbourhood, relatively flexible, and not tied to a given locality. This analysis also considers the sociocultural legacy of late Soviet friendship.

The subsequent three chapters draw upon empirical evidence from a qualitative study of Russian-speaking migrants in London and address the key factors which make friendship relevant for exploring and explaining migrant social connections. Chapter 3 demonstrates how Russian-speakers establish, re-establish and maintain their social networks and friendships while living in London, and how their friendships are connected with place. I discuss what happens when Russian-speakers meet each other in the city, how and why personal contact can be prompted (or not), and how the image of ‘Russian friendship’ feeds into spatial distances and proximities. This presents a variety of ways in which migrants are connected with each other, and establishes London as a social space where these connections are negotiated and migrants’ personal networks are formed.

Chapter 4 focuses on the localised functioning of Russian-speakers’ friendship networks in the city, and those factors which limit the development of these ties. Drawing upon the assumption that friendship is perceived as a particular relationship that is negotiated and selectively relied upon by Russian-speaking migrants in the social spaces of London, I develop two premises. First, I demonstrate how friendship becomes one of a range of ways in which people are seen as relating to one another and differentiated by degrees of closeness. Second, the concept of ‘ethnic networking’ cannot adequately describe the social relationships of migrants who live in conditions of ‘super-diversity’. Drawing upon my empirical evidence, I develop Ryan’s (2011) arguments in favour of the reappraisal of bonding and bridging ties, incorporating the additional distinctions between friendship and acquaintance noted in Russian studies on friendship (Kharkhordin and Kovaleva 2009), and suggest that it is the characteristics of a relationship such as trust and the perceived affective or pragmatic qualities that migrants rely upon and that have to be considered in an analysis.

Chapter 5 is focused on the ways in which relationships with those considered as ‘others’ are accorded certain meanings by migrants, and on how attitudes towards different co-inhabitants of diversity are dynamically shaped and re-shaped. The main point of this chapter is that these relationships can be ethnicised and racialised, as well as denationalised and become more cosmopolitan. Indeed, both of these processes intertwine and result in a complex picture of a migrant’s positioning of self within the multiculture. Friendship is one of the domains of sociality where these processes are negotiated in practice. I attend here to the patterns of migrants’ informal social ties as a domain of cosmopolitanisation and as a development of open and inclusive attitudes in personal relationships. This chapter points to the need for understanding migrant sociality as a complex of informal relationships based upon processes of inclusion and exclusion which are an essential part of migrants’ positioning of self in a multicultural city.

In the conclusion, I emphasise that migrants often are not just ethnic communities segregated from the main population and locked into sociality primarily with their compatriots; yet this state of affairs does not necessarily mean that they are therefore highly mobile postnational subjects incorporated into global society. I argue that the location of a migrant group in a city and the dynamics of its development have to be analysed through a range of people’s informal relationships in personal networks; these personal networks may be situated in different locations and play an important role in mobility patterns. I argue that friendship should become a more prominent theme in research on migrant communities. It is a relationship which is not limited by more fixed kinship or neighbourhood ties (Ryan et al. 2008; Wellman et al. 1988), has significant potential in inspiring and sustaining mobility (Conradson and Latham 2005a), and is a specific affective relationship irreducible to ethnic or national solidarity (Bunnell et al. 2012; Morosanu 2013a). I conclude by outlining this book’s contribution to developing migration scholarship. Overall, this study perceives migrant social relationships as a dynamic complex which includes local and cross-border, ‘bonding’ and ‘bridging’ (Ryan 2011) components and does not seek to reduce migrant relationships down to individual elements at the expense of other important factors.