About

Outline of the project assumptions

The main aim of the project is to collect diverse biographical accounts of members of the Polish scientific diaspora, i.e. Polish-born scientists working abroad, in order to analyze “geographical imaginaries” – mental images of different places and people inhabiting them. The role of geographical imaginaries remains relatively underexplored in research on international migration, let alone research on the Polish intellectual diaspora. The ambition of the project is therefore to present to academic and non-academic audiences (e.g. journalists) the complex stories of people who have experienced academic migration “to the West.” The project assumes that some hegemonic imaginaries about universities in countries such as the United States or the United Kingdom can be challenged by a detailed analysis of the biographical experience of internationally mobile scientists.

The project uses a variety of qualitative data sources to examine the biographical experience of life and academic work of Polish-born migrants. The research focuses on the United States and the United Kingdom (considered as global centers of scientific knowledge production) and Canada and Australia – two other English-speaking academic systems.

The research design is based on a multi-stage data collection process. The analysis will include: (1) written memoirs/diaries of Polish academic migrants, (2) autobiographical interviews with Polish academic migrants, and (3) new memoirs of contemporary migrants – obtained through a competition addressed to migrant scholars.

In order to take into account the historical specificity of the academic environment (and its significant transformations), the study focuses on the biographical experiences of scientists who left Poland over five decades: the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, 2000-2009 and 2010-2019, i.e. in the period after March 1968 and before the COVID-19 pandemic, excluding political migrants, for whom the decision-making process took place in completely different circumstances.

Project implementation stages

Work package 1.
Mining sources. Recorded memories of the Polish intellectual diaspora.

University of Lodz, Faculty of Economics and Sociology

The aim of this package is to identify and sociologically analyze the autobiographical memories of scholars born in Poland who emigrated to one of the English-speaking countries: the USA, Canada, Great Britain and Australia in the 1970s or later (at least 100 sources).

Authors of materials must meet the following criteria: (1) born in Poland, (2) acquired at least part of their education in Poland, (3) spent at least two years abroad.

The selection of the sample is based on the strategy of maximum diversity (Patton 1990). For this reason, a wide collection of historical sources (100 autobiographical accounts) will enable contrasting comparisons, taking into account variables such as gender, scientific discipline, type of institution (domestic and foreign), and length of professional employment at the time of migration.

The collected material will be analyzed in two ways: using classical content analysis and during specially organized interpretive seminars.

The results will then be presented in the form of partial empirical meta-syntheses and scientific papers and conference presentations – both national and international, in order to present the stories and life experiences of Polish migrant scientists (and their sociological interpretations), also for foreign audiences.

Work package 2.
Storytelling the present. Biographies of the intellectual diaspora after 2004

University of Lodz, Faculty of Economics and Sociology

• At this stage of the project, it is planned to conduct 100 autobiographical narrative interviews with scientists born in Poland who left Poland after 2004 – the year in which Poland joined the EU.
• The participants in the study (“narrators”) must meet the following criteria:
  • (1) be born in Poland,
  • (2) receive at least part of their education in Poland,
  • (3) spend at least 2 years abroad,
  • (4) leave Poland no earlier than 2004.
• The module is based on the methodology of higher education research from a narrative perspective (Magalhães and Veiga, 2015), which allows for the analysis of hidden motives and an in-depth analysis of social mechanisms.

Work package 3.
Writing the present. Recording the memory of the Polish intellectual diaspora after 2004

University of Lodz, Faculty of Economics and Sociology

The project will organize a competition for memoirs/diaries of academic migrants. The tradition of research based on memoirs is very long in Polish sociology. It dates back to the groundbreaking work of William Thomas and Florian Znaniecki on the fate of the Polish peasant in America and includes a wide range of projects (see: Jarmusiewicz 1971; Jakubczak 1998; Pawłowska 2009; Szatur-Jaworska 2001). Among the most recent projects, it is worth noting a project based on the memoirs of the unemployed, which, adopting a biographical perspective, explored the topic in an innovative way (Posłuszny and Kubicki 2019; Błędowski and Karwacki 2020) and “Memories from a pandemic” (Głowacka et al. 2022).

Participants in the competition will be asked to write memoirs documenting their migration experiences. All authors must meet the following criteria:

1. be born in Poland,
2. have received at least part of their education in Poland,
3. have spent at least two years abroad,
4. have left Poland after 2004.

Competition participants will be asked to write their life stories, with particular emphasis on their migration histories and career paths.

The outcome of this phase of the project will be the collection of at least 30 autobiographical accounts of the new generation of Polish academic migrants (emigration after 2004), which will also be made available in an “open access” format.

Work package 4. Theoretical approach to intellectual diaspora. Triangulation of sources

University of Lodz, Faculty of Economics and Sociology

The final work package will allow the team to identify geographical imaginaries and their smaller parts, phantasms (Boesch 1991), in a variety of biographical sources: written memoirs, autobiographical interviews, and memoirs written for the competition. This part of the project will allow the team to discuss their results in the context of existing literature, resulting in a multi-author publication. The winners of the memoir competition will be able to publish their work as a monographic chapter in English. The raw material will be developed and preceded by a theoretical introduction, situating the collected materials against the background of social research on academic migrations and a summary of the project results.