Marcu Veronica (CSSD) - 2024-25 Students
Veronica.Marcu@cssd.ac.uk

Transnationalising solidarity: migrant Eastern European workers in the UK and cross-border practices of resistance

This CDA analyses practices of transnational solidarity from Eastern European migrant economic workers based between the UK and their home countries of Romania and Bulgaria (A2 countries that joined the European Union in 2007). The CDA is a collaboration with lead partner MayDay Rooms, a UK-based organisation and archive of historical materials documenting social struggles, resistance campaigns, experimental culture and expression of marginalized and oppressed groups, with The Royal Central School of Speech and Drama and King’s College London. Taking an interdisciplinary approach the project draws on methodologies of performance studies, border studies and applied theatre. It does so to examine the ways in which the particularity of Eastern European migrancy of so-called ‘seasonal workers’ moving between East and West Europe creates hybrid and transnational cultures of worker-led resistance and solidarity that cultivate crossborder alliances. Uniquely, the CDA brings together histories of class-based and migrant struggle in the UK, with those from postsocialist A2 countries, through the prism of performance-led participatory research. It will contribute new scholarship and methodological approaches to transnational solidarities as sites of functional alternatives to hostile environments (Roelvink 2016).

Recent sociological research has evidenced the position of Eastern Europe as a ‘semi-periphery to the capitalist world system’ in which aspirations towards European integration expose the region’s dual status as entangled with processes of colonisation as well as colonising (Vilenica 2023). At the same time, the deployment of ‘cheap labour’ from Eastern Europe in the UK and other Western European countries points to the particularities of a transnational labour linking distinct geopolitical sites (Forster 2016, Lewicki 2023). Whilst these phenomena are usually approached distinctly, this CDA examines the transnational networks that emerge in the movement of workers between the UK and their home countries.

The aim of this CDA is to analyse emergent transnational solidarities in hostile cultures through facilitating Eastern European seasonal workers to enter in dialogue with practices of UK-based migrant labour organising. It will do to advance knowledge on the ways in which movement across borders forges transnational solidarities that resist borderisation, and to understand the complex identities forged across multiple related hostile environments.

Principle Supervisor: Dr Diana Damian Martin

Partner organisation: Mayday Rooms