Coping With Post-Soviet Transition: Achievement Vs. Survival Life Strategies Of Post- Independence Ukrainian Migrants In Australia (1991 - 2013)

Abstract

This thesis discovers and explains post-independence Ukrainian migration to Australia through the analysis of migrants’ life strategies, seen as the outcomes of personal characteristics and individual actions as well as of cultural frames, institutional and structural conditions (relating micro and macro levels of analysis within agency-structure perspective). Relying on the 51 interviews with migrants in Australia, this study examines the survival and achievement life strategies of migrants across two spaces, the sending and receiving countries, in three ways. First, it examines how micro structuring life strategy components (values, aims, needs and sense of agency) are formed by life in Ukraine and by Australia migration policy (macro structuring factors of life strategy). Second, it examines how Ukrainians utilise the international migration and how they adopt it in order to get into Australia and change their temporary visa status into permanent. Third, the thesis explores how life strategies are recreated or changed after migration. In all three aspects of the thesis the central questions of inquiry are: how are survival and achievement life strategies formed and implemented in relation to migration and how has the migration experience impacted on the ways in which the participants’ life strategies were enacted in two different migration periods (1991–2003 and 2004–2013) and how they determine the success or failure of integration in the Australia society. This study resulted in a collaborative research to the body of knowledge on the post-independence Ukrainian immigration to Australia with a potential for contribution to the development of social and migration policies of both countries. The originality of this research is in its approach that brings the concept of life strategy within migration methodology and deploys it in sociological context rather than its original psychological focus.