Discourses of a ‘Normal Life’ among Post-accession Migrants from Poland to Britain

Abstract

This chapter focuses on the construction of the idea of a normal life in the discourses of Polish post-2004 migrants. Complementary to other methodological approaches adopted in earlier studies on contemporary Polish migrants to the UK. The other project from which the chapter draws is based on Internet data which was collected from an Internet discussion forum attached to the influential Polish daily Gazeta Wyborcza . The ethos valued by communist propaganda was marked with a strong anti-materialistic tendency, aiming to promote post-materialistic values and an aversion towards growing rich and also towards rich people. Ultimately, one issue has emerged as dominant in this research; both groups of researched post-enlargement migrants used linguistic resources rooted and embedded in the same discourse of normality', which connects closely to conceptualizations of moderation which were prevalent in Poland before 1989. It is one more example that post-communist transformations, although translocal in this case, can only be fully understood in their historical context.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 74 citations exist upstream.