Peryferyjna mobilność : negocjowanie znaczenia peryferii w erze globalnej mobilności

Alongside the growing scholarship on interconnectedness, individualization and globalization, the categories of polarization, peripheralization and othering remain crucial for understanding postmodern identities. A special value of “a periphery” conceptualization should be seen in its potential to shed light on what it means not to be in the center. More specifically, the labour-centred paradigm continues to foreground economic issues categorizing migrant as mobile peripherials: lower-educated employees who often take on the non-desirable 3D-type jobs in the destination country, further problematizing them as causing social unrest and abusing Western welfare benefit systems. This occurs regardless of the growing evidence to the contrary, which suggests long-term settlement, non-economical migration motivations, high levels of professional achievements abroad and traits of cosmopolitan (rather than simply transnational) disposition (eg. Ignatowicz 2011, Trevena 2011, Favell 2008, Ciupijus 2011, White 2011). Zooming in on the ‘periphery’ concept, the article tackles questions about whether the periphery notion can still be used in its objective or generic sense, and which categories do we need to explore in the times of globally intensified movement of people that represent social localities much more diverse and intersectional in regards to ethnicity, religion, social class, gender, etc. We examine multi-level framings of peripherality for people migrating from the peripheries of their own country to the peripheries of their destination society, those leaving the peripheries behind (spatially and metaphorically), as well as those pre-emptively situated in the “neither-nor” land of European fringes between its centre and (even further) peripheries. In that sense, we contextualize how migrants (or simply: mobile people) frame their own positionality in regard to being „from the peripheries” through negotiating their place to live, investing in their social, cultural and economic capital, and contest the rooted dichotomies of East/West, Europe/non-Europe, whiteness/non-whiteness, and, last but not least - skilled elite/unskilled labourer. Narrative evidence presented in this paper demonstrates that there is a range of inherent discrepancies between people’s accounts of their positionalities/identities, and the labels that scholars who deal with mobility use to describe the participants of contemporary and globalized cross-border flows. The aforementioned terms embedded in the dichotomies may no longer be applicable or sufficient to explain reflexive narratives of both struggles and contestations. Empirical data from several research projects focused on migration between Poland and the West (UK, Germany, Norway) in recent years is used to showcase those findings that pertain to the categories of rural/urban, peripheral/central and local/global, and, more importantly, go beyond them. Building on the transitional society example, we attempt to construct a model of global-peripheral mobility, which must neither signify exclusion and marginality, nor be geographically-conceived through the “world-system” development lens. We put forward an argument that while the macro-level categories may aid the group-centered analysis, their impact has significantly decreased in the individual narratives. The divides are mitigated by modern landscape of the facilitated “global” access through new technologies of communication and transportation, as well as new discourses that, to certain extent, redefine the meaning of peripherality, as a social location and an individual condition.