Polish migrants in Scotland: voting behaviours and engagement in the Scottish independence referendum

Polish migrants are the largest non-UK born population in Scotland (56,000 in 2012). As EU citizens who are resident in Scotland, they are eligible to vote in the 18 September 2014 referendum on Scottish independence. Using a survey of 245 Polish migrants in Scotland we investigate their level of engagement with the Scottish referendum asking; do Polish migrants vote and where (Poland and/or UK)? Will they take part in the referendum? Will the outcome of the referendum have an impact on their migration or settlement plans in Scotland

Development and limitations of social relations among diverse rural residents in the Scottish Highlands

This article focuses on the development and the limitations of convivial, instrumental, and intimate family relations among diverse rural residents in the Inner Moray Firth area of the Scottish Highlands. Drawing on 22 semi-structured interviews with international migrants (EU nationals), internal migrants (UK nationals), and participants who were born and never left, this article identifies and critically discusses how different types of social relations develop, or not, within and between these groups of rural residents. This article indicates that while all participants experienced convivial relations, these encounters did not always transfer into close, meaningful relations. The instrumental and meaningful relations, however, were more ambivalent in practice and related to internal divisions within rural communities defined along the lines of who is perceived to be “local” or “not local”. The instrumental ties were developed among participants with common interests, similar life stages, and experiences and varied in terms of ethnic and national composition. Similarly, while family ties were crucial for a sense of belonging, their ethnic and national composition differed. By illustrating the complex composition of convivial, instrumental, and family ties in rural Highlands, this article highlights that meaningful social relations supporting social integration should not be understood via social encounters with “local” residents only, but also intimate and instrumental social relations within and between migrant populations

Social Relations Among Diverse Rural Residents in the Scottish Highlands

This article focuses on the development and the limitations of convivial, instrumental, and intimate family relations among diverse rural residents in the Inner Moray Firth area of the Scottish Highlands. Drawing on 22 semi‐structured interviews with international migrants (EU nationals), internal migrants (UK nationals), and participants who were born there and never left, this article identifies and critically discusses how different types of social relations develop, or not, within and between these groups of rural residents. This article indicates that while all participants experienced convivial relations, these encounters did not always transfer into close, meaningful relations. The instrumental and meaningful relations, however, were more ambivalent in practice and related to internal divisions within rural communities defined along the lines of who is perceived to be "local" or "not local." The instrumental ties were developed among participants with common interests, similar life stages, and experiences and varied in terms of ethnic and national composition. Similarly, while family ties were crucial for a sense of belonging, their ethnic and national composition differed. By illustrating the complex composition of convivial, instrumental, and family ties in rural Highlands, this article highlights that meaningful social relations supporting social integration should not be understood via social encounters with "local" residents only, but also intimate and instrumental social relations within and between migrant populations

The effect of wheat soilborne mosaic virus on agronomic characters of wheat

Call number: LD2668 .T4 1978 N94Master of Scienc

EU migrant retention and the temporalities of migrant staying:a new conceptual framework

Challenges of weak economic growth, population decline, and labour shortages led many countries across the world to introduce immigration policy changes in order to attract foreign migrants. This paper focuses on Japan (Tokyo) and the UK (Birmingham, Edinburgh and Glasgow) given common concerns over long term demographic trends and the burgeoning lack of labour supply in particular sectors of the economy through use of foreign labour. The paper shifts the focus from efforts focused on attracting and selecting foreign labour to the retention of such individuals. Drawing on research with EU migrants in Japan and the UK, the paper highlights how staying may occur after a period of mobility, rather than only being of relevance to those who never left their home region. The paper develops a new conceptual framework, which helps to identify different dimensions that shape migrant staying as a temporal process. It is highlighted how staying is shaped incrementally and facilitated or undermined over time in relation to the reciprocal importance of diverse assets, anchors and the changing biographies of migrants and the places in which they live – as well as the relational aspects of migrants’ ‘linked lives’

Stakeholder citizenship: the complexities of Polish migrants' citizenship attachments in the context of the Scottish independence referendum

This article focuses on the experiences of Scotland’s largest foreign-born minority group, namely Poles, in the run-up to the Scottish independence referendum in 2014. We draw on 20 in-depth interviews to explore our participants’ intentions and justifications for voting (or not) in the referendum. We found that our participants tended to emphasise the jus domicili principle when justifying their eligibility to vote in the referendum. However, our participants extended the jus domicili principle in their justifications to also include the intention to stay in Scotland as a central aspect of their continuing stake in (and right to vote in the referendum to determine) Scotland’s future. Through exploring our participants’ justifications for voting in the referendum, we were able to examine and better understand how migrants constitute their citizenship through articulating their substantive attachments (social, economic and relational or familial) in their adoptive country and in their country of origin

EU post-accession Polish migrants trajectories and their settlement practices in Scotland

The presence and the apparent permanence of post-accession EU migrants in the UK is of significant interest to both academics and politicians. Studies have debated whether migration from new accession countries to the UK mark a new type of migration often described as ‘liquid’ and ‘open ended’, or whether these migrants will settle in the new destination countries. Based on a qualitative study of Poles who have lived in Scotland for at least six years, we observed four typologies of what we call migrants’ settling practices: (1) stayers, (2) over-stayers, (3) circular and transnational migrants and (4) economic migrants. The findings from this study demonstrate that Polish migrants do not have fixed ideas about the duration of their migration (in terms of a sense of permanence) but instead focus on diverse links, anchors or attachments in Scotland and Poland in describing their settling practices. Thus, the main contribution the article makes is to present an in-depth understanding of what settlement means from the perspective of migrants themselves. This paper concludes by providing a short comment on implications of the outcome of the Referendum on EU membership ‘Brexit’ in June 2016 on Polish migrants settling practices

From privileged to thwarted stakeholders – Polish migrants’ perceptions of the Scottish Independence Referendum 2014 and the UK General Election in 2015

Scotland in 2014 and 2015 provides an ideal context for examining EU citizenship political rights as established in the Maastricht Treaty of 1993 from the perspective of Polish migrants resident in Scotland. We argue that the contrast between Polish migrants’ full enfranchisement in the Scottish Independence Referendum in 2014 to then being disenfranchised from the UK General Election in 2015 is a significant site for observing how EU laws interact with state-centric and also ‘post-national’ notions of citizenship. Our participants’ experiences of voting in the Referendum and subsequently not being able to vote in the General Election were articulated in the following terms: (a) the justification of their political rights in terms of their stake and contribution in the UK; (b) their frustrations with regards to anti-migration rhetoric and the limitations of European citizenship; and for some, (c) their plans of apply for British citizenship in the context of EU membership uncertainty

Complexities of Polish migrant's citizenship attributions in the context of Brexit and the Scottish Independence Referendums

This article focuses on the experiences of Scotland's largest foreign-born minority group, namely Poles, in the run-up to the Scottish Independence Referendum in 2014 and subsequently the UK's EU Referendum. Through exploring Polish migrant residents initial responses and experiences with regard to both referendums, this article (1) outlines perspectives on blurred and contested boundaries and formations of citizenships and (2) the implications of complex and changing relations between citizenship attributions (e.g. political participation, legal status of citizenship and sense of belonging) on the process of citizenship formation. This article therefore offers a greater understanding of the transformation of traditional state-centric concepts of citizenship rights into the shifting borders and character of citizenship formation during the times of political uncertainties

Blast noise classification with common sound level meter metrics

A common set of signal features measurable by a basic sound level meter are analyzed, and the quality of information carried in subsets of these features are examined for their ability to discriminate military blast and non-blast sounds. The analysis is based on over 120 000 human classified signals compiled from seven different datasets. The study implements linear and Gaussian radial basis function (RBF) support vector machines (SVM) to classify blast sounds. Using the orthogonal centroid dimension reduction technique, intuition is developed about the distribution of blast and non-blast feature vectors in high dimensional space. Recursive feature elimination (SVM-RFE) is then used to eliminate features containing redundant information and rank features according to their ability to separate blasts from non-blasts. Finally, the accuracy of the linear and RBF SVM classifiers is listed for each of the experiments in the dataset, and the weights are given for the linear SVM classifier. © 2012 Acoustical Society of America