The region of Podlasie is a historically diverse area where Catholic, Orthodox, and Muslim communities have coexisted for centuries. Since 2021, due to an increase in irregularized migration, the area has been experiencing a transformation into a militarized zone where racialized narratives about Polishness and Europeanness are highlighted and reproduced. Official discourses portray Muslim migrants as threatening the national identity, which affects all Polish and non-Polish Muslims in Podlasie. This article explores strategies adopted by different groups of Muslims in Podlasie in the face of racialization processes. The main focus is on a well-established group of Polish Tatars whose centuries-long presence on the Polish territory allows for claims of familiarity and sameness to be made. While Tatars tend to reference their bond with the state through their respect for the military and Catholicism, other Muslims strive for personalization to improve their subordinate position in the hierarchies of Polishness. Some of these strategies reinforce racialized notions of belonging, further perpetuating existing divisions. However, acts of solidarity are also present among the communities, irrespective of their social distance. This article illustrates how racialization practices impose hierarchies of belonging on different Muslim groups in Podlasie and showcases strategies of negotiation of their status within those hierarchies.

In the ethnographic tradition, hospitality is commonly understood as the structuring principle of the guest–host relationship, implying unequal power distribution. It can also be seen as a process by which the host appropriates a space as home, while the guest is relegated to a precarious, temporary, and liminal position. This paper analyzes the structural position of Afghan refugees evacuated to the Albanian town of Shëngjin by various (mostly US-based) organizations after the Taliban regained power in Afghanistan in August of 2021. It traces the discourses, ideologies, and practices of hospitality enacted by different actors: the Albanian government, the local authorities, international organizations, and the displaced Afghans themselves. The paper contrasts the political discourse of hospitality with the refugees’ practices of hospitality. When mobilized by state authorities, hospitality serves as a powerful tool for constructing the refugee as a liminal and precarious social subject, while also strengthening the notion of the nation. At the same time, refugees’ practices of homemaking and hospitality challenge this framework, destabilizing the static and territorialized notion of home and rejecting the representation of refugees as passive recipients of foreign generosity.

The article introduces the special issue Keywording the European Irregularized Migration Regime: Reflections from/on the Peripheries. It maps the itineraries of “keywords” from their origins as an introductory reading framework to their development into a distinct methodological approach. The analysis traces the conceptual journey from Raymond Williams’s seminal work Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (1976) to their contemporary uses. It follows and comments on two main traditions: a philological one, focused on linguistic histories, and a cultural studies one, viewing keywords as sites of social struggle and transformation. Particular attention is given to keywording in the context of migration, highlighting contested issues and divergent approaches in this field. The discussion concludes with reflections on keywords developed within the ERIM research project – The European Irregularized Migration Regime at the Periphery of the EU: from Ethnography to Keywords, of which this special issue is an outcome.

This article analyses a range of coping strategies that women have developed to adapt to the contingencies of day-to-day life in housing exclusion, that is to say, living in inadequate and/or insecure housing. Considering the exploratory nature of this study and a focus on lived experiences of women facing housing exclusion, a qualitative approach was used. Interviews with 22 women experiencing housing exclusion were conducted in five cities throughout Croatia. Different contexts that may severely constrain the opportunities and choices available to women in relation to their abilities to cope are discussed. These include current and past experiences of housing exclusion and homelessness (rooflessness and houselessness) as well as adverse childhood experiences, abuse and violence, economic vulnerability, and social exclusion. The study documents women’s accounts of their daily difficulties and endeavors to sustain a sense of meaning while facing chronic poverty, hardships, and intersecting inequalities. The findings show that women actively use more problem-focused forms of coping, where they generate different solutions to problems and strive to change stress-provoking situations in comparison to using passive emotion-focused forms of coping. This holistic study of a previously overlooked group and unexplored topic generates new lines of inquiry and lays the groundwork for future research with practical policy recommendations.

Eneolithic sites in Croatia have yielded a number of animal figurines manufactured from clay. Among them is the bird-shaped vessel from the Vučedol site, which gained the status of possibly the most famous archaeological artifact from Croatia. This zoomorphic representation inspired different prominent interpretations that elaborated the potential symbolic, religious, and mythological values of the artifact. Drawing on recent contributions that encourage focusing on more-than-human societies and different ways in which people relate to material culture, this paper will attempt to move away from strictly symbolic interpretations of this artifact. By considering potential meeting places of birds and humans, partridges as a species, and clay as the material that frames their figural representation, this paper suggests that the famous bird from Vučedol is not merely a symbol or a vessel for a ritual drink, but could represent a bird that humans interacted with in shared landscapes and one that reminded them of their own connection with the ground.

Pored toga što se suvremenim režimima migracija naturaliziraju kao statične, nepropusne i neupitne linije razgraničenja, etabliraju kao mjesta sortiranja željenih i neželjenih tijela i egzistencija, instrumentaliziraju u procesima diskriminacije, administrativne, rasne i kulturne separacije (Balibar 2002), granice predstavljaju i specifične akustičke teritorije. Ti se akustički teritoriji, u kompleksnom međudjelovanju prostora, zvučanja i slušanja (Daughtry 2015), oblikuju kroz supostojanje i preslojavanje aglomeracija zvukova prirode, ljudi i tehnologija koji rezoniraju prostorom granice. Kao takvi, oni neminovno participiraju u iskustvima i praksama suvremenih migracijskih kretanja, dok su istodobno kontinuirano upregnuti u sustave kontrole i nadzora tih kretanja, duboko protkane asimetričnim odnosima moći. Oslanjajući na akustemološki usmjereno istraživanje iregulariziranih migracija na geopolitičkim prostorima takozvane balkanske rute, ovaj rad pokušava identificirati slojevite akustičke teritorije granica i mijenjajuće auditivne režime suvremenih migracijskih kretanja na periferiji EU. Pritom nastoji pridonijeti razumijevanju zvuka kao neodjeljive komponente migrantske svakodnevice; kao ishodišta specifične zalihe slušnog iskustva i potencijalno djeljivog akustičkog znanja; kao refleksije asimetričnih odnosa moći; te kao jedne od relevantnih razina iskustva koje participiraju u uspostavljanju, pregovaranju i dokidanju granica (ne)pripadanja.

North Macedonia occupies a central position along the so-called Balkan route, which stretches from the Southeast Asia and Africa to Northern and Western Europe. The country has a long history of significant seasonal cross-border migration, connecting the region with the rest of Europe. It has primarily been a country of emigration, with a long tradition of mobility within the Ottoman Empire and Yugoslavia, and subsequently to Western Europe and other overseas destinations. In 2015 and 2016, North Macedonia became a transit country for around one million people and its transit role continues for a smaller number of people today. Drawing on ethnographic research, this paper examines local responses to mobility regimes and injustices using the example of two border villages: Lojane/Llojan and Tabanovce. It explores the changes to the natural and social landscape that create new connections and dependencies between migrants, non-governmental organizations, local residents, and the Macedonian state. I identify three factors that shape the narratives and practices of both the local population and the authorities: a long history of migration to and from Macedonia, a sense of abandonment by the state and international institutions, and the temporary nature of refugee centers.

The article investigates oral narratives by modern residents of Mezen about the survival of four fishermen marooned on Edge Island (Spitsbergen) in 1743–1749. It presents an analysis of how the historical event described in the 18th century by Pierre-Louis Le Roy has been transformed into modern oral stories. The main focus is on the role of institutional (museums, schools) and informal (family lore) channels of memory transmission, as well as the influence of social status, education, and profession of respondents on the structure and content of their narratives. The study is based on field materials collected during 2022 fieldwork in the town of Mezen in the Arkhangelsk region. The results show that the narrative of the Mezen “Robinsons” has been primarily preserved among cultural and educational professionals, while the remaining respondents are either unfamiliar with the narrative or have substituted it with their own experiences. The key elements of the narrative (shipwreck, existential struggle, rescue) are identified, as well as their folkloric and modern interpretations. The article contributes to the study of mechanisms of transmission of historical memory and demonstrates how book versions of events are adapted in the oral tradition, combining elements of primary and secondary orality. The work is interdisciplinary in nature, combining methods of folklore studies, anthropology, and sociology.

This article explores how ordinary objects – such as ladders, ketchup, and mayonnaise – become charged with political significance in the context of irregularized migration along the Balkan route. In two ethnographic case studies conducted at the EU’s southeastern borderlands, we examine how these mundane items acquire new functions and meanings in connection with border violence. Ladders, used by migrants to scale fences at the Serbia–Hungary border, circulate through informal networks and become both tools of mobility and mediators of physical harm to border crossers. Ketchup and mayonnaise, distributed as part of survival kits by solidarity networks, reappear grotesquely in instances of sadistic violence during Croatian police pushbacks. Migrants’ creative and tactical use of everyday, makeshift objects reflects the codes of structural violence, as these items become embedded in complex regimes of control and resistance. This dual appropriation – from below and from above – highlights material entanglements of humanitarianism, repression, and embodied agency. Drawing on theoretical frameworks of materiality, migration regime, and critical border studies, and by tracing their circulations and transformations, we uncover how borders are negotiated not only through policy or protest, but through the everyday use and redefinition of things.

This paper looks at the United Kingdom’s governing of the Channel during the late 2010s, early 2020s – exposing how relationships of capital and race have been configured in this particular conjuncture through the policing of “small boats”. Using the analytic of moral panics (Hall et al. 2013), I investigate how concerns of maritime safety, hard immigration, and crackdowns on “smuggling” gangs convene in the policing of “entry” via sea, yet obfuscate a set of socio-economic conditions prevailing in post-2008 racial capitalism. Drawing on Stuart Hall’s analysis of “mugging” in 1970s Britain (Hall et al. 2013), and Ida Danewid’s conjunctural work on the European border regime (2022), the paper situates “small boats” in a longer arc of racialised panics in which various crises of accumulation and racial hegemony have been rendered onto migrants and vessels (via policing, mediatisation, courts and policy). In particular, I focus on Eastern and Southeastern European migrants as an important part of the Channel’s political economy. Foregrounding the historic interaction of enclosure of Britain’s imperial space and Europe’s peripheries, and ongoing securitisation of Channel crossers (as facilitators, criminals, bogus asylum seekers, and surplus labour), I argue for a closer understanding of how the racialisation of Black, Brown and “not quite white” articulate.