Karolina Barglowski - Cultures of Transnationality in European Migration

Transnational mobility in the EU has become a key factor for supra-national integration, equal life chances and socioeconomic prosperity. This book explores the cultural and social patterns that shape peoples migration, the historical and contemporary patterns of their movement, and the manifold consequences of their migration for themselves and their families.

Exploring the links between social and spatial mobility, the book draws attention to the complexity of moving and staying, as ways in which social inequalities are shaped and reinforced. Grounded in research conducted in Germany and Poland, the book develops the concept of cultures of transnationality to analytically frame the variety of expectations involved in migration, and how they shape migration dispositions, opportunities and outcomes.

Cultures of Transnationality in European Migration will be of broad interest to scholars and students of transnational migration, European development, cultural sociology, intersectionality and subjectivity. Specifically, it will appeal to scholars interested in the cultural ramifications of moving and staying as well as those interested in the interplay of gender, ethnicity and class, in the making of social inequality.

Karolina Barglowski is a Junior Professor of the Sociology of Migration at Technical University Dortmund, Germany. Her research focuses on social inequality, European migration, transnational social protection, qualitative methods and cultural sociology.

Subjectivity, Family and Inequality

Karolina Barglowski

First published 2019

by Routledge

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2019 Karolina Barglowski

The right of Karolina Barglowski to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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ISBN: 978-1-138-55794-9 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-315-15114-4 (ebk)

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Among the many turns in the recent history of sociology, the cultural turn may have been the most consequential for understanding social practices. Patterns of meaning, which include sweeping narratives and manifold symbols, exert remarkable influence on social practices and institutions. They affect categorisations such as inequality, gender and class as a socioeconomic structure and classism as classification along social class lines; and such categorizations have consequences in the field of migration. Against this background, the overarching and crucial question is how the complex cultural processes involved in migration can be conceptualised. In this book, Karolina Barglowski addresses this question as central to any non-deterministic analysis of social meaning, and stands in a long and innovative tradition dating back to Max Webers interpretive sociology. In general, this way of asking questions about meaning helps us to see how actors construct their own social reality. In particular, it directs our gaze to how economic, social, but also symbolic and cultural, resources interact in producing and reproducing social inequalities in migration processes.

Karolina Barglowski argues that links between culture and inequality in migration studies have been largely unexplored. The core of the book explores the meanings individuals attribute to migration and their social relations while constantly (re)locating themselves in a changing transnational social space. The author uses individuals social expectations towards significant others and towards themselves as a heuristic. The analysis casts social expectations as a major process by which social structures and, by implication, social inequalities are produced and reproduced.

Surprisingly, there has been a dearth of studies which deal with peoples social expectations regarding migration. This book fills this gap by posing the question of how structural opportunities and constraints contribute to the development of individual social expectations and how these become behaviourally relevant in migration processes. This study is necessary and timely because, up until now, accounts have been mostly structural-relational or individualistic, and have not sufficiently taken into consideration how social expectations are shaped and in turn shape action and practices of movement and settlement.

The empirical case at the centre of this book is certainly a crucial one, as the transnational spaces spanning Germany and Poland form one of the densest and historically longest patterns of social interaction in Europe. We have seen all kinds of migratory movements occurring in this space, ranging from seasonal workers, crafts workers and highly-skilled migrants, through family reunification migrants and ethnic Germans, to asylum seekers and refugees. Karolina Barglowskis account is fascinating in that it shows that the meaning-making in cultures of transnationality rests on socially-produced boundaries along differences such as gender, class, mobility itself and ethnicity. She also demonstrates that such boundaries are partly transformed in processes of migration. These boundaries viz. categories shape what people expect and determine what is expected of them. This book features an extraordinary conceptual and theoretical breadth and depth by discussing transnational, intersectional and interactionist paradigms. It offers a sophisticated understanding of methodology and qualitative methods, and it engages in a systematic and painstaking analysis of the empirical material. In short, this study is a fine exemplar of an unusually reflective analysis, both with respect to theoretical exposition and empirical grounding.