CRONEM Spring 2006 Seminar Series
January 30th (Monday), 2006
Department of Economics (School of Human Sciences)
University of Surrey
Room 04AD00
5.00 - 6.30 pm
Researching Ethnicity and Class: London’s New Poles
Michal Garapich and John Eade, CRONEM
Although substantial numbers of Poles settled in Britain after 1940, they have attracted
relatively scant interest among social scientists. Recent migration by ‘new Poles’ has led
to media interest bound up with immigration and competition for jobs but our ESRC
project is the first to tackle the issues of ethnicity and class through a methodology which
draws on economics (through Stephen Drinkwater) and sociology and anthropology (John
Eade and Michal Garapich).
The CRONEM Seminar provides us with an opportunity to reflect on the data we have
collected so far on this one-year project. We also want to discuss the analytical models,
which may be useful in analysing the data.
We will focus here on the qualitative data generated from 75% of the planned 50 in-depth
interviews. One of the most striking features of these interviews is the way in which our
respondents talk about their Polish identity at length but then falter when we invite them to
discuss class. As highly mobile actors in today’s post-industrial economy they seem to
want to contest or make class notions and status boundaries irrelevant. They emphasise
their position as individuals and the uses to which they put collective Polish identity in
specific social and economic contexts.
We will explore the reasons for this situation in the context of globalization, transnational
networks, the global city, competition within the post-industrial service economy, racial
and ethnic difference, the changing social and economic character of Poland and the
respondents’ self-perception as temporary or circular migrants.