Everyday cosmopolitanism in representations of Europe among young Romanians in Britain

The paper presents an analysis of everyday cosmopolitanism in constructions of Europe among young Romanian nationals living in Britain. Adopting a social representations approach, cosmopolitanism is understood as a cultural symbolic resource that is part of everyday knowledge. Through a discursively-oriented analysis of focus group data, we explore the ways in which notions of cosmopolitanism intersect with images of Europeanness in the accounts of participants. We show that, for our participants, representations of Europe are anchored in an Orientalist schema of West-vs.-East, whereby the West is seen as epitomising European values of modernity and progress, while the East is seen as backward and traditional. Our findings further show that representations of cosmopolitanism reinforce this East/West dichotomy, within a discourse of ‘Occidental cosmopolitanism’. The paper concludes with a critical discussion of the diverse and complex ideological foundations of these constructions of European cosmopolitanism and their implications

Migrant family display: a strategy for achieving recognition and validation in the host country

This article draws on the narratives of 10 migrant families living in a predominantly White British northern UK city, Hull, and brings together the typically distinct fields of the sociology of family, transnational family studies and migration studies. By uniquely applying the lens of family display to migrant family accounts, this article offers a timely new way to understand the strategies migrant families employ when negotiating recognition and validation in an increasingly globalised world. Existing applications of family display focus on what might be referred to as unconventional families: same-sex couples, dual-heritage families, single-parent households, and families living in commercial homes. Furthermore, previous migration studies consider the strategies employed by migrant individuals, sometimes within a family, but do not do so through the lens of family display. The concept has not, then, been applied to migrant families and their everyday lives, and with a specific focus on understanding the influence of audience in family display. This article, therefore, contributes to migration and transnational family studies by providing a new way of understanding migrant family lives, and also advancing the concept of family display in three clear ways: by showing that migrant families do display family to audiences beyond the family–including the State–so as to present as a ‘legitimate’ family; by expanding understanding of how family display is enacted; and by arguing that broader narratives influence those related to ‘family’ and impact on how and why migrant families engage in family displays

Constructing the eastern european other: The horsemeat scandal and the migrant other

The Horsemeat scandal in the UK in 2013 ignited a furore about consumer deception and the bodily transgression of consuming something so alien to the British psyche. The imagination of the horse as a noble and mythic figure in British history and sociological imagination was invoked to construct the consumption of horsemeat as a social taboo and an immoral proposition in the British media debates. This paper traces the horsemeat scandal and its media framing in the UK. Much of the aversion to horsemeat was intertextually bound with discourses of immigration, the expansion of the EU and the threat in tandem to the UK. Food as a social and cultural artefact laden with symbolic meaning and national pride became a platform to construct the ‘Other’ – in this case the Eastern European Other. The media debates on the horsemeat scandal interwove the opening up of the EU and particularly UK to the influx of Eastern European migration. The horsemeat controversy in implicating the Eastern Europeans for the contamination of the supply chain became a means to not just construct the ‘Other’ but also to entwine contemporary policy debates about immigration. This temporal framing of contemporary debates enables a nation to renew and contemporise its notions of ‘otherness’ while sustaining an historic social imaginary of itself

The ritualisation of food, home and national identity among polish migrants in London

In this paper a process of negotiating identity among Polish migrants will be discussed in relation to their food habits: consumption, preparation and celebration. Through the ethnographic examination of food rituals the construction of meaning of home as both space and nationality will be observed and the attitude to the host culture will be revealed in the quotidian activities. The qualitative research based on interviews and visual ethnography has shown that there are three dominant ways of exchange with the local culture ranging from the least present to the ostentatiously conspicuous, named here as: orthodox, porous, and alternate. Each of them, however, is characterised by a perplexing degree of fluidity and sometimes contradiction which opposes the objectification of the models of culture, as had been already noticed by Bhabha (2007[1994]) in relation to diasporic cultures and their tactics of adaptation. Home among Polish immigrants to the UK is a changing concept, open to negotiation, depending on their current personal situation, profession, gender, expectations, ambitions and even peer pressure. Yet (re)creating home requires a certain dose of familiarity conceived from the meaning of Polishness which needs to be materialised from past memories on a daily basis. This research shows that such process oscillates between acceptance and rejection recognisable in the acts of mundane rituals, gaining their significance from the emotional engagement of the participants.Peer reviewedFinal Accepted Versio

Negotiation of normality and identity among migrants from eastern europe to the United Kingdom after 2004

Peer reviewedFinal Accepted Versio

Female representation and dominant ideologies in Polish advertising

Looks at the representation of women in Polish advertising in relation to the prevailing trends of ideological and political power in Poland. Explores how advertising operates with stereotypes about women; how it applies women's images; and how those images refer to Polish reality.Peer reviewe

The ethical foundation of critical pedagogy in contemporary academia: (self)-reflection and complicity in the process of teaching

In this paper an ethical approach to educational methodology is discussed in relation to the philosophies of Emanuel Levinas and Robert Cox. Cox's anti-essentialist understanding of historical materialism and Levinas' metaphysical idealism are applied to an analysis of the (self)-reflective methods required today in Higher Education in the UK, such as Problem-Based Learning (PBL) and Personal Development Planning (PDP). The paper identifies a post-Kantian paradigm of the subject-object dichotomy as a cause of the ontological constraints which pervade critical pedagogy, and instead it proposes a pre-ontological ethics of the relationship with the other which questions self-centred strategies of reflection.Peer reviewe