The article synthesises and reviews existing research on Polish migrants in the Nordic countries with a specific focus on gender identities and gender roles. The authors argue that migrants from Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) fall between the cracks in the current research on gender equality and migration in the Nordic countries. Being the trademarks of the Nordics, the ideals of gender equality and sexual rights play an important role in the debate about migration. However, the dominant focus of the current research is non-Western racialised migrant groups. While migrants from Poland are privileged as white and European, they come from the context with less egalitarian gender norms and the weaker state policies supporting gender equality. The article aims to understand how Polish migrants navigate this difference in gender values and norms between home and host societies. The article concludes that structural factors are important for migrants’ ability to learn and adopt the gender norms of the host society. In line with the translocational approach, migrants navigate between home and host societies, choosing appropriate gender roles accordingly. The social status, the degree of integration and the sense of (non)belonging also play a crucial role in migrants’ openness to the norms of the host society. The article also suggests several directions for further research.
Keywords: Albanian migration, irregularisation, kurbet, cultural capital, moral economy, migration infrastructure
Abstract
Irregularised migration from Albania to the United Kingdom emerges as a governance-produced status, negotiated through socioculturally mediated practices, rather than as a criminal propensity. Drawing on digital-historical ethnography with Albanian migrants who entered the UK via irregularised routes (2015–2020) and a Bourdieusian relational approach, this article explores how emic grammars of kurbet (obligatory sacrifice), kanun (reputational ordering) and besa (commitments of trust) shape the interpretation and moral evaluation of mobility. Through repeated enactment, these grammars sediment as dispositions within a mobile habitus (endurance, reputational vigilance, reciprocity expectations) and mobilise resources (trust guarantees, route knowledge, embodied resilience) that become capital only when recognised as valuable within specific fields (kinship, diaspora, brokerage, algorithmic field). Yet, within UK border-labour regimes, often mediated through intermediaries, the same resources are misrecognised as illegality or commodified as priced intermediation, producing ambivalent effects that normalise risk and recalibrate moral obligations. The article contributes a relational theory-of-practice account that links irregularisation to field-specific regimes of recognition and valuation.
In both Poland and France, gender, sexuality and reproduction are central to the constructions of nationhood and statehood, with categories such as race, religion and ethnicity playing a crucial role in public debates surrounding sex, family planning and the roles of men and women. This article employs the theoretical framework of belonging and the politics of belonging to examine how Polish migrants in Paris and the surrounding region of Île-de-France renegotiate their identities in relation to broader national and global discourses on gender, race and religion. Focusing on first-generation migrants from diverse working- and middle-class backgrounds, the analysis explores how they navigate belonging to various collectivities – whether national, diasporic or religious communities – and how they assert their deservingness to live in the host country, maintain ties to their homeland, participate in civil society or cultivate a sense of cosmopolitan identity.
Race-Making in the East of Europe: Understanding Imperial and Colonial Histories and their Afterlives in the Dynamics of Race-Making and Migration in the Region
