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The figure of the Polish plumber or builder has long been a well-established icon of the British national imagination, uncovering the UK's collective unease with immigration from Central and Eastern Europe. But despite the powerful impact the UK's second largest language group has had on their host country's culture and politics, very little is known about its members. This painstakingly researched book offers a broad perspective on Polish migrants in the UK, taking into account discursive actions, policies, family connections, transnational networks, and political engagement of the diaspora. Born out of a decade of ethnographic studies among various communities of Polish nationals living in London, Michal P. Garapich documents the changes affecting both Polish migrants and British society, offering insight into the inner tensions and struggles within what is often assumed to be a uniform and homogeneous category. From Polish financial sector workers to the Polish homeless population, this groundbreaking book provides a street-level account of cultural and social determinants of Polish migrants as they continually rework their relation to class and ethnicity.
This book offers a unique and innovative way of looking at the paradoxical consequences of human mobility. Based on a three-year transnational multi-sited longitudinal research project, it demonstrates that not all migrants acquire, transfer and implement social remittances in the same way. Whilst the circulation of ideas, norms and practices is an important aspect of modernity, acts of resistance, imitation and innovation mean that whilst some migrants become ordinary agents of social change in their local microcosms, others may contest that change. By putting this individual agency centre stage, the authors trace how social remittances are evolving, and the ambiguous impact that they have on society. This thought-provoking work will appeal to students and scholars of sociology, geography and anthropology.
Increasing and changing migration trends between Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) and Western European locations, as well as those from outside of Europe to CEE, pose new challenges for the regional study of race and racialisation, including growing diversity and the tightening of border security. This book brings together a range of established and emerging scholars of CEE migration, race, whiteness and post- and decoloniality to explore these themes from/to and within Central and Eastern Europe. The book includes chapters on Bulgarians, Lithuanians, Romanians, Hungarians, Czechs, Ukrainians and Poles, including Polish Roma, in Western Europe and CEE as well as non-CEE migrants at the Polis...
The expansion of the European Union in May 2004 through the entry of ten countries from Central and Eastern Europe, has generated considerable media interest - interest which was revived by further expansion in January 2007 when Bulgaria and Romania became the latest nations from the east to join. Rather than focus exclusively on changes within the EU labour market and related policy debates, this book offers a careful, grounded analysis of the social and cultural processes bound up with migration flows between Britain and Bulgaria, placing these flows in the wider European perspective. As such, Accession and Migration will be of interest not only to migration scholars but also to policy makers at local, national and international levels.
EPDF and EPUB available Open Access under CC-BY-NC-ND licence. This collection scrutinizes the methodological and ethical challenges that researchers face when working with and for Gypsy, Roma and Traveller communities in the context of global crises. Contributors assess the impact of the pandemic on their engaged research, evaluating novel methods and technologies. They reveal how current research practice blurs the borders between activism and scholarship, and they argue the need for innovative collaborations with local communities. Showcasing emerging aspects of GRT-related scholarship, this book makes a key contribution to larger debates on the positionality of researchers and the politics of research, and affirms the continued value of rigorous ethnography.
A ground-breaking volume that gathers the testimonies of NGO workers, street vendors, activists, scholars, health professionals, and creative writers to chronicle the devastating impact of COVID-19 on Romani communities globally. The contributors reveal how the pandemic has exacerbated Romani disenfranchisement and document the resilience and creativity with which Romanies have responded to the crisis. Deploying innovative textual formats, and including poignant personal reflections, memoirs, scholarly analyses, and diary excerpts, the volume provides a roadmap for collaboration and dialogue at a time of global emergency. This is the most significant chronicle of Romani stories about the COVID crisis ever assembled. From the Introduction: The contributions include memoirs, opinion essays, transcriptions of conversations or interviews, ethnographic analyses, and a compelling short story by Romani writer Iveta Kokyová, as well as pieces that stride the boundaries between one or more of these genres, or that fit into none.
Immigration is continuously and rapidly changing the face of Western countries. While newcomers are harbingers of change, host nations also participate in how new populations are incorporated into their social and political fabric. Bringing together a transcontinental group of anthropologists, this book provides an in-depth look at the current processes of immigration, political behavior, and citizenship in both the United States and Europe. Essays draw on issues of race, national identity, religion, and more, while addressing questions, including: How should citizenship be defined? In what ways do immigrants use the political process to achieve group aims? And, how do adults and youth learn to become active participants in the public sphere? Among numerous case studies, examples include instances of racialized citizenship in “Algerian France,” Ireland’s new citizenship laws in response to asylum-seeking mothers, the role of Evangelical Christianity in creating a space for the construction of an identity that transcends state borders, and the Internet as one of the new public spheres for the expression of citizenship, be it local, national, or global.
As the European Union seemingly teetered from a financial crisis to an immigration crisis around 2015 and onwards, discourses of race appeared to congeal in various member states. In some instances, these came with familiarly essentialist constructions; in others these were refracted cautiously through concerns about security, national and cultural integrity, distribution of public resources and employment, and so on. New political alignments surfaced on the back of such concerns, and established organizations changed their agendas accordingly. The border regimes of EU member states became increasingly fraught, both in terms of their everyday operations and in terms of the close attention an...
Migration has been one of the most pressing societal issues throughout history. Immigrant associations play a crucial role in understanding this phenomenon. They channel migration streams, influence the assimilation of their members, and serve as representatives of the entire immigrant group in society. However, they remain an understudied subject, particularly in historical research. To address this gap, this study examines German immigrant associations in New York from the 1890s to the 1930s. Through an innovative combination of statistical and textual analyses, it explores the class composition of these associations, their intricate system of mutual aid, and their political activities. Th...
Britain has largely been in denial of its migrant past - it is often suggested that the arrivals after 1945 represent a new phenomenon and not the continuation of a much longer and deeper trend. There is also an assumption that Britain is a tolerant country towards minorities that distinguishes itself from the rest of Europe and beyond. The historian who was the first and most important to challenge this dominant view is Colin Holmes, who, from the early 1970s onwards, provided a framework for a different interpretation based on extensive research. This challenge came not only through his own work but also that of a 'new school' of students who studied under him and the creation of the journal Immigrants and Minorities in 1982. This volume not only celebrates this remarkable achievement, but also explores the state of migrant historiography (including responses to migrants) in the twenty-first century.