Elisabeth Scheibelhofer (TRANSWEL) will give a keynote at a semi-plenary session on Migration in Times of Europe’s Economic Crisis at the 13th Conference of the European Sociological Association in Athens, August 2017.

Against the background of ideological and economic crisis in Europe, the conference focusses on the contradictions of capitalism, fragmented solidarities and emerging resistant or nationalist subjectivities. With its focus on migration, project TRANSWEL can contribute to the conference theme in uncovering the expriences of EU internal migrants in a time of austerity and increasing inequality, shrinking cross-European soldarity and the rise of nationalism. The project analyses the transfer of social security rights of EU citizens from new EU member states who move to live and/or work in old member states and traces their migration between four country pairs: Hungary–Austria, Bulgaria–Germany, Poland–United Kingdom and Estonia–Sweden.

Scheibelhofer’s presentation Free Movement Revisited – Labyrinths of Transnational Social Security will discuss results from qualitative TRANSWEL fieldwork of EU internal migrants and their experiences with transnational social welfare systems. This fieldwork shows that social inequalities are highly reproduced by complex and ambiguous regulations within EU social security systems. Social stratification is accelerated as one-time working migrants with no care obligations at young or middle age with high cultural and economic capital can realise free movement within the EU to a much higher extent than other groups. Free movement thus needs to be re-evaluated: Many Europeans cannot secure their social security even if employed and contributing to the social security systems of the EU countries they live in.

More information on the session under esa13thconference.eu/index.php/programme/conference-sessions/semi-plenaries