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.

The first English-language monograph on the Slovak-Polish border in 1918-47 explores the interplay of politics, diplomacy, moral principles and self-determination. This book argues that the failure to reconcile strategic objectives with territorial claims could cost a higher price than the geographical size of the disputed region would indicate.

Despite extensive and continuous academic interest in migrant and transnational families, a stereotypical view that those leading mobile lives are somehow beyond the contours of normativity is still prevalent. Such a perspective concerns both kinship and family practices of “familyhood” across borders, and the bi- or multicultural settings of providing or offering care. Consequently, we primarily hear about migration leading to broken relationships, the dissolution of families and bonds, substandard provisions of care, abandonment, exploitation of employees and so on. In this climate of public imagination of migrants either being “dangerous” or concurrently stealing one’s job and scrounging off the welfare state, it is no small feat to be a migration scholar. Trying to overcome the universalising views that essentialise human experience requires a wholly different point of departure, one which is represented in this volume. This is because a now well-established transnational paradigm allows for a more nuanced analysis, originating with the premise that not only normalises mobility, but also proves that various ties and relationships can be continued in the long-term despite spatial distance. On the whole, the transnational lens provided here showcases how new family practices are devised and deployed in mobile family lives, thus allowing the argument that migration enriches certain dimensions of contemporary family life and caregiving. This book plays on the dichotomy of migration as “the new normal” and mobility as a continuous source of challenges. The core issues examined here concern such problems as maintaining kinship ties across borders, new patterns of mothering and fathering, children’s sense of belonging and identifications, and social capital and engagement in community life. It reveals that “doing family” in the migration context often eludes simple definitions of national space or typical family. Instead, it offers a transnational understanding of how a person practically and pragmatically arranges one’s family and kinship, strategically choosing pathways of care, child-rearing, relationships at home, maintaining traditions and so forth.

This book explores attitudes towards migrants and refugees from North Africa and the Middle East during the so-called migration crisis in 2015-2016 in Poland. Beginning with an examination of Polish government policy and the discursive construction of refugees in the media, politics and popular culture, it argues that they identified refugees with Muslims, who were deemed to pose a threat to the Polish nation. This analysis establishes the Islamophobic public discourse which is shown to be variously reproduced, negotiated and contested in the nuanced study of Polish attitudes which follows. Drawing on original qualitative research and constructivist theory, the book examines differing stances towards refugees in the context of the lay understanding of the Polish nation and its boundaries. In doing so it demonstrates the influence of discourses that draw on an exclusionary concept of national identity and the potential for them to be mobilised against immigrants. This timely, theory-based case study will provide a valuable resource for students and scholars of Central and Eastern European politics, nationalism, race, migration and refugee studies.

An important contribution to the ongoing debate about what the Allies knew about the concentration camps during the Second World War.

In a world dominated by the visual, this book presents how a focus on the sounded experience and acts of listening may carve a way to reformulate emerging publics, create space for critical multilingual engagement and deepen recognition of emancipatory practices. Examining the emerging logics and rhythms among a group of post-EU accession UK Polish migrants, this book focuses on the semiotic processes through which contemporary moving bodies and communities place themselves in sociolinguistic landscapes. It considers how they develop metrics to account for sociolinguistic change and authenticate their projects and practices in transnational timespace. In doing so, the book brings power differentials to the centre of language and objectivity debates and foregrounds material semiotics as an approach that enables a new collective potential and redefinition of sociolinguistic listening. By connecting research on scale in migration contexts with studies of embodied soundwork and of stance in semiotics, this book highlights how a focus on the sounded sign may bring us closer to the ways in which bodies and meanings are (re)made, and collective doing and thinking are formed in the globalised world.

I Could Be So Good For You is a unique portrait of north London's working class from the 1950s to the 21st century, and how it lived, struggled, survived and sometimes thrived. I Could Be So Good For You tackles head-on the pernicious and implicitly racist fiction that London, most especially north London, has no "real" working class in comparison to a more "authentic" working class in a place called "the North". In doing so it offers a history and a portrait of north London's working class from the 1950s to the 21st century, based on a wide and original range of sources including personal memoirs, autobiographies, collected oral histories and new interviews conducted by the author. The result is an important social history and a rich panorama of working-class life — its struggles, work, celebrations, events, triumphs, tragedies and the occasional nice little earner. For good or ill, from the start of post-war affluence in the 1950s to the economic crash of 2008, north London's working class had a life experience like almost no other part of the British working class, one not just of poverty, racism and exploitation, but also of bold new housing schemes in the heart of the city, of great opportunity and diversity and enjoyment. Its about time to tell that story.