Klaipėdos universitetas

The article discusses the concept of international social work. International social work peculiarities working with refugees and asylum-seekers in Lithuania and Sweden are analysed. Analysis of international social work with refugees and asylum-seekers revealed collaboration features, challenges and limitations of organizations working with the target group. Ethical dilemmas in international social work with refugees and asylum-seekers are presented and analysed.

This article presents the aspect of the social work professionalization which responds to the new challenges of a global society that is the refugee migration. The refugee problem in the European Union has recently become one of the important social problems. Due to the political situation in Africa South European countries are already unable to manage the daily flow of refugees. EU Parliament is trying to solve this problem. Lithuania has to be ready to solve this problem as well. The country which receives refugees not only has to have the legal regulation of this process, but also the professionals who could ensure the success of their adaptation. The authors, using different empirical research materials which were conducted in Lithuania in the years 2011–2014, reveal the depth of the needs and the possibilities of the social work services while implementing these needs in the context of social services in Lithuania. This is the presentation of the experience available. This article can help you to assess the situation and the opportunities that are ahead for the Lithuanian society when helping to solve the problem of today’s refugees in the European Union. At the same time this article reveals one more aspect of the identity in the social work profession, revealing the depth of the social worker’s competencies in a changing society and his ability to operate in unspecified situations.

This article addresses intersections of migration and economic development as one of the most topical contemporary challenges inthe Baltic states. It uses empirical approach to compare governmental responses to recent economic crisis starting in 2008. Articleanalyses, how these responses were reflected in statistics revealing socio economic dynamics within years of crisis and beyond.Methods of comparing statistical and analysing secondary data are applied. All three states have similar future challenges of agingand declining population and see return migration as one of possible solutions to address this challenge. However, the processesin Estonia provide a better ground for its government to claim that the country makes effort to ensure more stable development.Also, the results demonstrate that Estonia displays more different trends, while Lithuania and Latvia are closer to each other in outmigrationtrends.

This article presents the analysis of the results of qualitative research about large families’ social, economical situation and possibilities of support in the community. There were 14 respondents of large family members. All families of respondents consist of both parents and three or more children. Respondents answered to open questions. This paper presents research participants’ opinion about the economic situation of large families, family members’ economic migration problems and opportunities of community support for these families. It was found that large family experience finances’ limits and it causes the migration. The activity in community enlarge and it enable support for large families.

The study has been conducted within the ERASMUS+ KA2 partnership project “Improving the initial education of adult immigrants”. Research is based on the anonymous survey in which took part 1127 legal adult immigrants from outside the European Union. The study was performed in 2017 in the six European Union countries: Lithuania, Latvia, Romania, Bulgaria, Italy and Belgium. The purpose of this article is to investigate how information about the host country before immigration is related to immigrants’ basic sociodemographic characteristics, i.e.: age, gender and education. Statistical data analysis showed a statistically significant difference between the information, which immigrants knew before their arrival in the host country, and education as well as age groups. However, there were no statistically significant differences found between the information, which immigrants knew before their arrival in the host country, and immigrants’ gender. Moreover, information that immigrants lack most prior to their arrival is related with health care and the employment system as well as the ability to learn the hosting country’s official language.

Between the 16th and the 18th centuries, the area known from 1920 to 1939 as the Klaipėda region (Memel territory) experienced a variety of migration flows, which have been described by researchers on several occasions. When considering issues of migration, among other data, scholars from different fields often interpret personal and place names found in historical records. Based on the historical onomastics of the Klaipėda region, this article deals with the oikonyms and personal names derived from etymons bearing the meaning ‘new settler’. It examines their distribution, evolution, etymology, and motives behind picking these onymons. The author draws on research methods of historical onomastics, along with an analysis of historical sources and genealogical information. In addition to suggesting mutual links between onyms (personal names and oikonyms) of Baltic origin, the author puts forward hypotheses about the directions of population migration in the northern area of what was then the Memel eldership (Hauptamt Memel). The paper aims to offer linguistic insights into possible migration trends in the Klaipėda region in the 16th to the 18th centuries, which could later be verified by historical research.

Important but up to now more or less unsolved questions of early Medieval archaeology focus on the date and the process of Slavonisation in the southwest Baltic area. The state of knowledge in various regions of northeast Germany and Poland lead to partly different research reviews, which in some cases even expressed opposing opinions. There are only a few absolute dates available indicating that the beginning of the Slavonic settlement can be dated to the late seventh and early eighth centuries, but how this process of slavonisation can be explained is still unknown. Did a new Slavonic community migrate into a devastated landscape, or was there a change of identity into a Slavonic way of life connected with continuous Germanic settlement? New interdisciplinary investigations of late Germanic and the earliest Slavonic settlements in northwest Poland focus on these questions. The aim of the research project is to obtain new references for continuities or discontinuities in the history of the settlement and the use of the landscape in the area of Pyrzyce, Western Pomerania, to explain processes of change from the sixth to the eighth century

The aim of the article is to explore how the migrant identity (especially, of the first generation) is changing under the influence of migration. Accordingly in the first part of the article the transnationalism and the concept of transmigration in relation to migratory experience are discussed, the second part is focused on the questions of identity and its boundaries, and the third part is based on the interpretation of empirical data from anthropological fieldwork by paying attention to the background, language and festivals of the immigrants as particular markers of the identity construction of the Lithuanian migrants in Northern Ireland.

This paper deals with the processes of identity reconstitution for descendants of Jewish emigrants from the Baltic and Central Europe, and with the current relationships they have with these regions. Considering their practices of identity reconnexion which are part of identity re-registration processes, the attention is centered on the individual and collective identity economies existing in victims’ families, and on the social interactions increasing in the context of the institutional politics concerning the Baltic and Central Europe. Many descendants of victims begin nowadays to come more and more to zones where their families lived, and not only to the extermination places. They try to find all that happened in the social history of their family before and during the Holocaust, and also what occurred for the Jews in these territories during the Soviet domination. They seek there the past and current presence of their cultural and historical heritage, which is also one of the important components of the European inheritance.

The article aims at delineating particular shape of identity used among those contemporary Texans who are descendants of the Lithuanian immigrants of one hundred and fifty years ago. It is argued that such an identity can be understood as traced, evoked and reclaimed, as well as based on local heritage and genealogy and thus local rather than ethnic. What is important for the modern ethnic (or post-ethnic) identity of the Texan Americans of Lithuanian descent is not the traditional criteria of ethnicity (such as language retention or endogamy), but rather recent histories, compiled via the internet, and recently constructed or even invented symbols and narratives of ethnic belonging. The historical marker for ‘Lithuanians in Texas’ and also narratives of the ethnic pride on ‘Lithuanians as Texas pioneers’ are among the examples of that.