Shifting Racialised Positioning of Polish Migrant Women in Manchester and Barcelona

Prejudice in the People’s Game: A Content Analysis of Race/Ethnicity in Polish Televised Football

“…At the same time, besides the global racial formations that are replicated transnationally within sport media, the racialized representation of Blackness in Polish sport media also appears to be rooted in hegemonic discourses in Polish society. Previous studies (Nowicka, 2018;Rzepnikowska, 2019;Ząbek, 2009) have shown how Western colonial discourses on race/ethnicity found a foothold in Poland in the 19th century despite-or perhaps because of-the general absence of Black people in Poland. These discourses were particularly preoccupied with the Black body and presented a binary image of the Black body that oscillated between admiration and loathing (Ząbek, 2007).…”

“…van Riemsdijk (2010, p. 117) argues that there are "variegated privileges of whiteness" also in visually homogeneous groups. In the Polish context, one way in which this variegation of Whiteness manifests itself is in the process of "attaining whiteness" (Law & Zakharov, 2019, p. 135), a process in which orientalizing discourses are (re)produced to distinguish Poland from its more Eastern and supposedly less European neighbours (Rzepnikowska, 2019;Said, 1978;Zarycki, 2014). These orientalizing discourses serve to reaffirm Poland's place in Christian, White Europe (Goldberg, 2006) by stressing the supposed civilizational inferiority of areas to the east of Poland.…”

“…The hegemonic conservative discourses on Polish identity stress the country's role as a "bulwark of Christendom defending Europe against the infidel (however defined)" (Zubrzycki, 2011, p. 25). Previous studies have pointed toward the role of normative Whiteness as a constitutive element in this national self-identification (Balogun, 2017;Jaskułowski, 2019;Rzepnikowska, 2019). Additionally, in recent years, Poland has witnessed immigration from mainly other White neighboring countries like Ukraine and Belarus (Mayblin et al, 2016).…”

Securitizing mobility: Profiling ‘non-core’ Europeans

“…All of a sudden, Poles were depicted as taking jobs from British workers and as putting a strain on public services and welfare. While racist and xenophobic violence in the UK has been particularly noted following the Brexit vote, several studies show that Polish and other East European migrants -particularly Romanians -have always been subjected to discrimination, racialization and prejudice in the post-2004 accession period (Dawney, 2008;Kempny, 2011;Rzepnikowska, 2016Rzepnikowska, , 2017Sobis et al, 2016). A recent study by the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights (2019) shows how EU migrant labourers, particularly those from CEE member-states, continue to be seen and treated both as threats to Western European societies and as workers for whom exploitation and abuse is acceptable treatment.…”

Brexit Rebordering, Sticky Relationships and the Production of Mixed-Status Families

“…By foregrounding what families feel and do as they learn to adjust to a new, unexpected and deeply divisive rebordering process, this article allows us to progress discussions about the emotional impacts of Brexit and the changes to rights, identities and belongings that have been a mainstay of research with EU citizens in the UK and British citizens in the EU. Such work has addressed the unsettling impacts of the Brexit referendum (see, for example, the special issue curated by Kilkey and Ryan, 2021; Guma, 2020; Kilkey et al, 2020), including how this was differently experienced among racialised British and European citizens (Allen and Ögtem-Young, 2020; Benson and Lewis, 2019; Zambelli, 2020), and how the sense of being unsettled has continued over the course of the Brexit negotiations, particularly in relation to questions of belonging and identity (see, for example, Abranches et al, 2020; Benson, 2020; Botterill et al, 2020; Rzepnikowska, 2020; Zontini and Però, 2020). Our article thus draws attention to the longer tail of Brexit, and its continuing emotional resonance and influence not only in the present but also on the decisions that people make about their current and future lives.…”