Representing migration past, present and future: Visaginas institutions between cultural preservation and transnational knowledge
ENIn this chapter, we analyse Visaginas through the optic of migration. Visaginas was founded in the 1970s by people who came to this sparsely populated area of lakes and forests in the north-east of Lithuania from all over the USSR (Šliavaitė 2010) as a result of trajectories within the Soviet nuclear network (Josephson 1999, Liubimau 2019). The collapse of the Soviet Union and the decommissioning of the INPP marked the end of the political and economic logic in which these journeys were made, but also led to new possibilities for movement after Lithuania joined the EU in 2004. As a result, Visaginas past and present has been marked by inward, outward and return migrations undertaken in different social systems, for a variety of reasons, in varying temporal rhythms and in diverse geographical directions. We propose that this unique migration constellation constitutes both a challenge and a potential resource for Visaginas, and requires finding ways to connect the town with the movements of its inhabitants. [...] The fieldwork for this chapter was carried out in the frame of a summer school in the town in 2016 aiming to reprogramme the Visaginas public library in the context of the changing knowledge infrastructures in which towns today operate. Within this frame, we reflected that migration forms a part of the challenges that libraries currently encounter (see Kapatsila in this volume, Muddiman 2000, O’Kelly 2014, Press Association 2016). Migration both requires and generates knowledge, even if in the case of labour migration this dimension is frequently perceived by employers, states and migrants themselves as secondary to the economic motivation for movement. We propose in this chapter that accenting migration in the reprogramming of the library can contribute to a reappraisal of the value of the knowledge migration generates and to sharing it within the community.In so doing, we claim that a focus on migration can contribute to making the library again relevant to the contemporary experience of town inhabitants, repositioning it as a key institution facilitating the development of Visaginas as a hub of municipal translocalism. In so doing, we suggest that the library can act as an innovator both in ensuring social justice (Pateman and Pateman 2019) in an era of inhabitant mobility and in enabling the town to integrate the connections forged by its inhabitants into its paths of future development. [p. 174].
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