ibidem Press, Stuttgart
Acknowledgements
Thanks to my friends, acquaintances, and colleagues who helped throughout the process of this books 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 wouldnt have completed this r e search.
Thanks to fellow researchers of Russian-speaking migrants for our fr uitful discussions: Andy Byford and Olga Bronnikova.
I appreciate the efforts of ibidem-Verlag, especially Andreas U m land and Valerie Lange, who helped make this book physically happen.
I am also grateful to Max Anley for his attentive and sensitive edi t ing 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 u n derstanding of how social lives are experienced. However , more recently geographers and others have begun to recognise the i m portance of paying analytical attention to friendship patterns and networks. While most attention has been placed on childrens and youth geographies, there has also been a recognition of the signi f icance of friendship in migration studies. As Tim Bunnell et al. (2012 : 502) have recently argued , a focus on friendship is i m portant in unsettling the prevailing emphasis on kin and neig h bourhood in seeking to understand the geographies of transn a tion al social life, f or, as this study illustrates so well, friendship networks are often the key elements through which contemporary experiences of migration, settlement , and transnat ional 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 b e tween people with shared national backgrounds or migratory e x periences in new places. However , we have tended to theorise these networks through the anthropol ogical 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 an a lysing friendship networks.
Darya Malyutinas 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 tr a jectories and contemporary transnational lives. This innovative f o cus on friendship is based upon an in-depth and insightful qualit a tive 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. Malyutinas focus on friendship groups allows her to tease out some of the important conceptual theme s which frame her analysis and provide an important critique of the existing limit a tions 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 a s sumptions 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 frien d ship networks also provide s a much - needed empirical depth to wider work on transnational ism. By analysing the range of frien d ships which migrant s retain , Malyutina is able both to map empir i cally, and emotionally, how transnational ties are retained and va l ued alongside an analysis which links the scales of the local and the transnational. Indeed, as she argues, friendship has the p o tential of insp iring and informing mobility . Her work is important i n 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 pr o vide 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 une x pected ways.
This book concentrates on the experiences of a group of migrants to London who have remained largely invisible in migration scho l arship and too often caricatured in the popular imagination as e i ther 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 chara c terisation of East Europeans. This study is therefore particularly important in illuminating the experience of a distinct group of rel a tively 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 atte n tive 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 v iolent e x pressions of emotions, last shirts, quarrels, embraces, and tears is unimag i nable 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 tha t is, in a loose translation, the private sphere, is for the Americans sacred. It is a coat of armour with which they protect the m selves 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 cit y like Lo n don? To what extent do migrants close informal relationships co r respond 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 m i grant community amounts to belonging to a friendship network . Migrants s ocial relations are not confined to relations between compatriots or migrants only. The constitution of a circle of pe r sonal connections and the degrees of personal closeness within that circle depend upon particular personal and structural cond i tions, as well as the circumstances that lead to migration, its te m poral dynamics , and a change in spatial location.
