249.1
Transnationalism As a New Model of Integration: Comparative Analysis of the Migrants' Everyday Life in Russia and the USA after 1991
The overall goal of the Lab’s research activities is to find out basic mechanisms that determine processes of social integration in the new paradigm of studying migration processes which has entered into the social sciences scholarship in the 1990s and has been called “transnationalism”. In the center of authors’ attention will be transnational structures of everyday life of migrants in the accepted societies (USA and Russia) as basis for the new policies of social integration in the system of coordinates not only of economic, political borders but also cultural borders of everyday life worlds.
The current migration studies are dominated by North American scholarship despite of the fact that new developments in the former Soviet Union countries bring new perspectives to the analysis as well as different approaches that have been developed on all the continents and notably in Europe shed different lights on migration processes. Until recently, migration research was strictly anchored in the nation-state experience of the receiving countries.
The paper promotes transnational migration research based on the belief that the potentials of comparative sociology will advance the theoretical development of migration research. Elsewhere we’ve proposed our understanding of comparative sociology – neither as a method, nor a subfield, but as a special organization of research through constant comparisons at the different levels of social reality. This research process is realized through a series of studies that could be descriptive or explanatory, theoretical or empirical, comparative case studies, small-N or large-N comparisons. (Rezaev, Starikov, Tregubova, Compartive Sociology, Brill, 2015, No.1)