EAC Thesis Award Winners

The EAC received 11 submissions for the 2024 EAC Thesis Award from Cardiff University, the University of Porto, the University of Bordeaux Montaigne, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, the American University in Cairo, Leiden University, and Erasmus University. The jurors of the 2024 EAC Thesis Award were impressed by the quality of the applications and, after thorough evaluation, have chosen the winning thesis: “Parallel Lives or Overlapping Worlds? Explaining the development of the social lives and interactions of Mediterranean migrants in the Rotterdam port region, 1960 – 1980” written by Gijs Hoekstra of Erasmus University Rotterdam, the Netherlands.

The executive summary follows, as written by Gijs:

In my thesis, I examined the integration of Mediterranean migrants into Dutch society from the 1960s until the 1980s, focusing on people employed within the Rotterdam port industry. Some of these people, at the time described as ‘guest workers’, made their stay permanent, but the large majority worked and lived in Rotterdam temporarily. While the topic of labour migration to the Netherlands has received significant scholarly attention, it has rarely been approached from a bottom-up perspective. In my thesis, I have attempted to do so by applying a qualitative analysis to primary sources that reflect migrants’ own experiences. I have aimed to analyse migrants’ social lives to see to what extent their lives overlapped with Dutch society and how (and why) this changed during their stay. An implicit question that my thesis posed is whether this bottom-up perspective leads to different conclusions than those drawn in earlier historical works on Mediterranean migrants’ integration.

The short answer to this is: not necessarily. The general conclusions that I make are the same as those presented in earlier works. Namely, the social lives of migrants became more ‘parallel’ to Dutch people from the 1970s onward. Consistently high recruitment numbers followed by an economic crisis – which hit port industries especially hard – made migrants’ stay more difficult. Their social lives in part turned inward as a protective measure against rising discrimination, but also because this was promoted by failing Dutch policy aimed at helping migrants integrate. However, the bottom-up approach has allowed for more nuance: it shows that there are cases of continuity between the 1960s (the period of early settlement) and the 1970s. The resulting image of migrants’ social lives is more diverse, giving a glimpse into the real impacts of expatriation on people’s lives. Furthermore, it shows that Mediterranean labour migrants were not unwilling to integrate and that their lives were never fully ‘parallel’: they influenced and were influenced by their host society in various ways.

The originality of my thesis comes mainly from this methodological approach, but also from the group on which it focused. While industrial labour migrants are not always seen as expatriates, by definition, many of them are. Labour migration is an important economic driving force, and without it, our industry could not have grown as it did. Besides this, even though many Mediterranean labour migrants worked and lived only temporarily in the Netherlands, they have had a significant impact on the social and cultural structure of the country. As such, I would argue that they are part of a group with historical significance to expatriate studies.

My thesis contributes to the EAC’s curatorial objectives in a methodological sense. An important part of the source material I used (the employee magazines of various companies) contained previously uncovered aspects of the expatriates' life stories and helped me better understand their motivations and experiences. Through my thesis, I hope to have brought these materials, which I found within the collection of the Maritime Museum in Rotterdam, more to the forefront. Besides this, through writing my thesis, archiving it at the Maritime Museum, and also through this submission at the EAC, I hope to have had a hand in preserving the life stories of a group of people who have had a lasting impact on Dutch society.

Finally, from a policy perspective, my thesis affirms the existing notion that Dutch policy in the past had failed as it was too strongly focused on strengthening migrants’ internal ties, as opposed to their ties to the host country population. This could be a lesson for contemporary policymakers, as – even for people staying within your country temporarily – an open approach aimed at involvement and assimilation works better for all parties involved.

The jury panel of the 2021 EAC Thesis Award have chosen a winning thesis: “The Lost Generation of Gulf Cooperation Council Countries (GCC): Stories of Loss, Longing, and Belonging”, an MA Research Project and Paper by Aaisha Zafar Islam of York & Ryerson Universities in Toronto, Canada.

The executive summary follows, as written by Aaisha:

The history of a people is the history of a land. However, not all those who are witness to the history of a land can claim a belonging to it. If expatriates as a group have their stories ‘fall through the cracks’ in the discourse around global migration and diaspora studies, then my MA research project and paper highlight another layer of complexity to these ‘lost’ stories: the dilemma of belonging and not belonging to a land as experienced by children of expatriate workers. My MA project, “The Lost Generation of Gulf Cooperation Council Countries (GCC): Stories of Loss, Longing, and Belonging” is inspired by my lived experiences, and the life stories of my generational cohort, the ‘Lost Generation’ of GCC, or ‘Generation 1.5.’ These are a people with multi-hyphenated identities whose sense of collective identity as a ‘GCC kid’ has no tangible connection with the land their first identities are formed in. From South Asia to the GCC and then GCC to Canada or other citizenship offering countries, my research project aligns closely with the mission and objectives of the Expatriate Archive Centre (EAC) to document life stories of expatriates (or expatriate children) and place them within the growing body of work around global migration studies. As a former journalist who wrote for the public, I have struggled with academia’s (arguably) isolated knowledge creation and knowledge sharing practices. If research is funded by the public, surely the public should have access to it in an easy to understand format? My research project was an attempt to bridge this divide between knowledge for academic and public consumption. Stories, recollections and memoirs are a time-honoured way of knowledge transfer and preserving histories. As a qualitative research tool, narrative inquiry offers a more wholesome and nuanced approach to studying a phenomenon. This project and paper entailed double the writing efforts, while one was an academic paper detailing the process of research conceptualisation, creation and analysis, the project was envisioned and executed as a work of creative non-fiction. It was written as a collection of profiles, taking an auto-ethnographical approach to the phenomenon, while drawing on interviews with people from ‘Generation 1.5.’ Planned as a phenomenological study with oral histories and narrative inquiries as primary methods of data collection, it sought to understand how ties are formed, severed and re-formed as a people move through different countries. The paper component was an exploration of the geo-political and socioeconomic factors that have resulted in a unique ‘non-citizen resident’ life experience in the GCC. These countries have reaped maximum advantage of the cultural, social and economic capitals of their ‘foreign’ workers, resulting in the GCC becoming a formidable power bloc in the world. On the other hand, restrictive biopolitical measures, immigration laws and policies, and nonexistent citizenship rights have resulted in a whole ‘lost’ generation of ‘expat’ children (Generation 1.5) with no claim to the land they are born in. This project and paper explores how this denial of existence and rights shapes the way these people view themselves, and their place in their new ‘home’ country, Canada. By examining scholarly literature around citizenship, economic migrations and expatriation, as well the geopolitical and geoeconomics conditions that foster conditions for migration and diaspora experiences, and situating them within a sociocultural context offers a more nuanced understanding of expatriate stories. In times when there is increasing interest around diversity and inclusion measures in policy-making and sociopolitical engagement in societies, qualitative research projects such as mine identify newer ways to studying and understanding migration, expatriation and diaspora experiences. My research project is different from traditional academic theses in its self-reflexive approach as it encourages the reader to engage with these stories. We can all do better with more self-awareness, compassion and empathy.