Polish Families In Ireland

This volume explores the family formation and life course of Polish people in Ireland, who make up the largest immigrant group in Ireland. Chapters address key dimensions of the life course in three parts focusing on childhood and youth, adulthood and parenting, and mid-life and futures. Contributions investigate the experiences of children and youth attending school and understanding their identities, the changing nature of families and family support, how families might engage with welfare institutions, and more. Through the life course approach, the book moves beyond the paradigm of studying the Polish population as economic migrants and instead analyzes and illustrates the lives of Polish families living in Ireland since EU enlargement.

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.

In a vivid account of every stage of the migration process, this topical book presents new research that looks in-depth at Polish migration to the UK, in particular the lives of working-class Polish families in the West of England.

This book contributes to our understanding of how older learners negotiate family internal and family external socialisation processes and thereby how parents' ideologies and practices, peer socialisation, and language status or societal demands come together in adolescents' lives. It integrates the sociohistorical context and adolescents' attitudes with the parents' role. Through the use of 'small stories' and ethnographic observation this book explores the social and cultural worlds of Polish immigrant adolescents in Ireland, the ways they seek membership and belonging in their communities of practice, and the ways in which they develop sociohistorical understandings across the languages and cultures they are part of. It sheds light on schooling and family communities and the role they play in the socialization processes of immigrant children.

This book contributes to our understanding of how older learners negotiate family internal and family external socialisation processes and thereby how parents’ ideologies and practices, peer socialisation, and language status or societal demands come together in adolescents’ lives. It integrates the sociohistorical context and adolescents’ attitudes with the parents’ role. Through the use of ‘small stories’ and ethnographic observation this book explores the social and cultural worlds of Polish immigrant adolescents in Ireland, the ways they seek membership and belonging in their communities of practice, and the ways in which they develop sociohistorical understandings across the languages and cultures they are part of. It sheds light on schooling and family communities and the role they play in the socialization processes of immigrant children.

This book discusses little-known linkages between two seemingly distant peoples, the Polish and the Irish, whose historical experiences share important similarities. Both Ireland and Poland have been subject to foreign rule, which they overturned in 1916 and 1918 respectively. Their predominantly Catholic societies were among the first to grant voting rights to women a century ago. This volume uses the centenary of both Ireland and Poland (re)gaining national independence and the political empowerment of women in these countries as a point of departure to analyse selected aspects of Polish and Irish people’s struggle for autonomy. Cases of mutual assistance, including the awareness-raising campaigns organized by Western women in support of the independence and suffragist movements in Poland, are presented along with examples of grassroots self-organization, foreign press coverage, and military and diplomatic efforts to empower the Poles and the Irish.