‘We Inspire Each Other, Subconsciously’: The Circulation of Attitudes towards Difference between Polish Migrants in the UK and their Significant Others in the Sending Society

Abstract

In this article, I explore how attitudes towards difference in terms of ethnicity, religion, sexuality and gender travel between Polish migrants to the UK and their significant others in Poland. In doing so, I bring together and critically engage with two disparate literatures—on social remittances and family and peer transmission of attitudes. I demonstrate that what occurs between Polish migrants and their non-migrant significant others is a complex process in which favourable and prejudiced attitudes are passed on, challenged, rejected or negotiated. While I stress that both migrants and non-migrants influence each other’s perceptions of difference, I show that non-migrants are more likely to assume the ‘correctness’ of migrant’s attitudes due to the construction of migrants as trusted experts. Acknowledging the multidimensionality and simultaneity of such mutual influences, in the article, I call for the use of the term ‘circulation’ to describe the mobility of ideas, values and attitudes between people and places.

Keywords:

• Social Remittances
• Transmission of Attitudes
• Transnational Circulation
• Difference
• Migrants as Experts

Acknowledgements

I wish to thank Kathy Burrell, Aneta Piekut and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on previous versions of this paper. I am also grateful to Gill Valentine and Nichola Wood for supervising and inspiring my doctoral research this article is based upon. Finally, thanks to all LIVEDIFFERENCE team members and Kasia Narkowicz in particular, for many stimulating conversations about my research data. This study is part of the European Research Council funded research programme ‘Living with Difference in Europe: making communities out of strangers in an era of super mobility and super diversity’ (LIVEDIFFERENCE).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Funding

This work was supported by the European Research Council [grant number 249658 awarded to Professor Gill Valentine].

Notes

[1] This is evidenced by recent research programmes such as Diffusion of Culture through Social Remittances between Poland and the United Kingdom [2012–2015] at the University of Warsaw, Poland, or Transforming Migration: Transnational Transfer of Multicultural Habitus [2013–2017] at Humboldt University, Germany.