No abstract

No abstract

Abstract:The aim of this article is to describe the personal networks of Ukrainian immigrants residing in an urban centre in the Czech Republic and to identify patterns that can help to elucidate some aspects of their integration. Social support networks in this study were created using the multiple name generator method. Here the generator was made up of six questions asking whom respondents might turn to for money, employment, housing, leisure, to discuss intimate things, or might simply be important to the respondent in some other way. Data-collecting was conducted in Pilsen, an industrial city with a large number of immigrants, and data were obtained from 30 Ukrainians. The networks were measured using structural measures (density, degree centrality and betweenness centrality) as well as common egocentric ones (multiplexity, frequency etc.). The analysis revealed that networks of Ukrainians are not very dense and consist mainly of friends. Friends are important in matters concerning housing, employment, and leisure. By contrast, family is important in more extraordinary situations -for instance, in a fi nancial emergency or to discuss crucial issues. There is also a signifi cant difference between the networks of manual and non-manual workers: manual workers are likely to associate with peers also working in manual labour and their networks are denser than the networks of non-manual workers. In Pilsen, Ukrainians do not form locality-based ethnic communities, and in a long-term perspective their personal networks indicate gradual social integration to the Czech society.

The article seeks to describe the poorest class's notion of time and through this critically address the prevailingly one-dimensional and unproblematised conception of time in the Czech social sciences. The relational concept of the poorest class here refers to individuals united by specifi c social practices and strategies that are determined by their position and mutual proximity within a social space. The article's theoretical framework is anthropologist Nancy Munn's practice-based or agent-oriented approach to time and space, according to which socio-cultural practices do not just occur in time and space but also create or produce that time and space. The concept of temporalisation (time and space) is used in this respect to refer to a variegated, symbolic process whose forms can encompass different degrees of awareness and consideration of the dimension of time. Through the optics of this theoretical approach the article examines four dimensions of agent-based temporalisation: (1) the tactical nature of time, (2) the relation between past, present, and future, (3) time reckoning, and (4) the rhythm of everyday practices. The text presents data from ethnographic fi eld research conducted in the urban setting of the City of Pilsen. The aforementioned dimensions of time are understood as a refl ection of social structures, that is, of the position of agents in a social space associated with poverty and marginalisation.

The article studies homelessness in the city of Pilsen, but instead of the traditional perspective, which works with the common defi nition of a 'homeless person', it introduces and defi nes the relational concept of the poorest class. The advantages of this class concept are that: (1) it does not rule out the possibility of the construction of a notion of home by members of this class; (2) it provides more information about social practices generally; (3) it focuses on the agent-individual, avoiding the reifi cation of a homeless person in the form of a homogeneous group. Using the concepts of active agency and space-time the article aims to describe time-space mobility, everyday practices, and the production of places of the observed agents. This study draws on the theories of Pierre Bourdieu and Michel de Certeau and on the space-time theories of David Harvey, Thorsten Hägerstrand, and Michel Foucault. It works with ethnographic data and puts forth the idea that unlike dominant places, which are strategically produced and can be ascribed one dominant meaning and associated practice, in the case of tactically produced places there are always multiple meanings and thus a myriad of associated practices. These specifi c places are 'heterotopias'. The article describes the (re)production of one heterotopia and in doing so offers an empirically based conceptualisation of such a place.