This book provides a critical analysis of the politics of migration in Eastern Europe and an in-depth understanding of the role played by media and public discourse in shaping migration and migration policy. Ruxandra Trandafoiu looks at emigration, diaspora, return, kin-minority cross-border mobility, and immigration in Eastern Europe from cultural, social and political angles, tracing the evolution of migration policies across Eastern Europe through communication, public debate and political strategy. Trandafoiu investigates the extent to which these potential ‘models’ or policy practices can be comparable to those in Western European countries, or whether Eastern Europe can give rise to a migration ‘system’ that rivals the North American one. Each chapter bridges the link between policy and politics and makes a case for considering migration politics as fundamentally intertwined with media representation and public debate. Drawing on comparative case studies of countries including Bulgaria, Croatia, Estonia, Hungary, Poland, Romania, Slovakia and Ukraine, the book considers how migration is both managed and experienced from political, social and cultural viewpoints and from the perspectives of a range of actors including migrants, politicians, policymakers and journalists. This book will be key reading for advanced students and researchers of migration, media, international relations, and political communication.

Border Crossings and Mobilities on Screen explores the movement, fluidity and change characterizing contemporary life, as represented on screen media, from mobile devices, to television, film, computers, video art and advertising displays. People have never moved around more, and increasingly migration and mobility has come to shape both our understandings of ourselves, and the ways in which we interpret and mediate the world we live in. As people move, media plays a key role in shaping and reshaping identity and belonging, opening the doors to transnational and transcultural participation. Drawing on screen media case studies from around the world, this book demonstrates how screen mobilities reconfigure notions of space, place, network and border regimes. The increasing ease of consumption and production of media has allowed for an unprecedented fluidity and mobility of class, gender, sexuality, nation and transnation, individual freedoms and aspirations. Putting people at the core of the book, this book shows the many ways in which people are using screen media to create identity, participation and meaning. The rich picture built up over the many chapters of this interdisciplinary volume raise important questions about the nature of contemporary media experiences. At a time of great change in the ways in which people move and connect with each other, this book provides an important global snapshot for researchers across the fields of media, communication and screen studies; sociology of communication; global studies and transnationalism; cultural studies; culture and identity; digital cultures; travel, tourism and place.

This book provides a critical analysis of the politics of migration in Eastern Europe and an in-depth understanding of the role played by media and public discourse in shaping migration and migration policy. Ruxandra Trandafoiu looks at emigration, diaspora, return, kin-minority cross-border mobility, and immigration in Eastern Europe from cultural, social and political angles, tracing the evolution of migration policies across Eastern Europe through communication, public debate and political strategy. Trandafoiu investigates the extent to which these potential 'models' or policy practices can be comparable to those in Western European countries, or whether Eastern Europe can give rise to a migration 'system' that rivals the North American one. Each chapter bridges the link between policy and politics and makes a case for considering migration politics as fundamentally intertwined with media representation and public debate. Drawing on comparative case studies of countries including Bulgaria, Croatia, Estonia, Hungary, Poland, Romania, Slovakia and Ukraine, the book considers how migration is both managed and experienced from political, social and cultural viewpoints and from the perspectives of a range of actors including migrants, politicians, policymakers and journalists. This book will be key reading for advanced students and researchers of migration, media, international relations, and political communication.

This book traces the particularities of music migration and tourism in different global settings, and provides current, even new perspectives for ethnomusicological research on globalizing musics in transit. The dual focus on tourism and migration is central to debates on globalization, and their examination-separately or combined-offers a useful lens on many key questions about where globalization is taking us: questions about identity and heritage, commoditization, historical and cultural representation, hybridity, authenticity and ownership, neoliberalism, inequality, diasporization, the relocation of allegiances, and more. Moreover, for the first time, these two key phenomena-tourism and migration-are studied conjointly, as well as interdisciplinary, in order to derive both parallels and contrasts. While taking diverse perspectives in embracing the contemporary musical landscape, the collection offers a range of research methods and theoretical approaches from ethnomusicology, anthropology, cultural geography, sociology, popular music studies, and media and communication. In so doing, Musics in Transit provides a rich exemplification of the ways that all forms of musical culture are becoming transnational under post-global conditions, sustained by both global markets and musics in transit, and to which both tourists and diasporic cosmopolitans make an important contribution.

After the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1989, millions of Romanians emigrated in search of work and new experiences; they became engaged in an interrogation of what it meant to be Romanian in a united Europe and the globalized world. Their thoughts, feelings and hopes soon began to populate the virtual world of digital and mobile technologies. This book chronicles the online cultural and political expressions of the Romanian diaspora using websites based in Europe and North America. Through online exchanges, Romanians perform new types of citizenship, articulated from the margins of the political field. The politicization of their diasporic condition is manifested through written and public protests against discriminatory work legislation, mobilization, lobbying, cultural promotion and setting up associations and political parties that are proof of the gradual institutionalization of informal communications. Online discourse analysis, supplemented by interviews with migrants, poets and politicians involved in the process of defining new diasporic identities, provide the basis of this book, which defines the new cultural and political practices of the Romanian diaspora.