Lithuanian men’s struggles with precarious life: unemployment,working identities,and strategies of survival

Using semi-structured interviews with young unemployed Lithuanian men, this article examines three distinct male working identities associated with ways of coping with unemployment and a sense of precarity: “desperate conformists,” “liberated dreamers,” and men “lost in work transition.” The interviews demonstrate that unemployment stigmatizes men, particularly those with lesser professional and social competencies crucial to efficient participation in the labor market. Therefore, the respondents’ incessant attempts to search for a job or their dreaming about it can be regarded as a way of resisting stigmatization and precarity.     

Slovakia

European Journal of Political Research -     

An historian writes Poetry

The territory of this new European state is crossed by strategically important passes, the lowest in the entire Alps, leading from the Danubian basin to the Mediterranean (Italy). Thus, the Slovenes had been under cultural, civilizational and political domination of centers from these two parts of Europe until 1918. Because the mountainous land forms, dissected also by valleys and basins, were prone to processes of diffusion rather than fusion, the Slovenes became a national and political subject of their own as late as the nineteenth century. From 1918 to 1990 they were joined to Yugoslavia, a South‐East European state, and learnt, to their cost, all the differences between the cultures of West and Central Europe on the one hand, and South‐East and Eastern Europe and the Near East on the other. Hence the plebiscite decision by the nation for an independent state.