Process of construction of the collective and the individual identity of Polish emigrants in the UK and Germany compared with the identity change of Ukrainian refugees in the Loiret department

January 26, 2024 - 9:00am to 10:30am

Location

ÉRCAÉ, INSPÉ CVL, 72 rue du Faubourg de Bourgogne, 45000 Orléans

The lecture will be followed by a discussion moderated by Prof. Philippe Bourdier (Research Team on Contexts and Education Actors (ÉRCAÉ), University of Orléans)

Presentation

I will present a category of social actors from empirical research data in the environment of the so-called Third-wave Polish emigrants (who arrived in England after 2004, and in Germany after 2011), whose life stories will be compared to those of the Ukrainian war refugees living in the Loiret department. I carried out 40 narrative interviews according to Alfred Schutze's methodology. By interpreting them I distinguished among them, as social actors, the category of empowerment or its absence. This distinction was possible thanks to the search for meanings of situations of common experience of social situations in exile, both individual and collective. I will show how these processes unfold for them and what social activities have been conducive, particularly in the field of social intervention, to the acquisition of a feeling of individual and collective action in the active construction of this life in a new place. Institutions, both formal and informal, have an enormous influence on this process, as well as on the definition of the social terrain in emigration, its recognition as becoming theirs, passing through the introduction of changes or their avoidance.