The paper looks at the selected issues related to the Polish migrants in Iceland. Since the beginning of the 21st century, the number of the Polish migrants there grew nearly tenfold and exceeded 17,000 in 2018. As a result, Poles are the most numerous national minority in Iceland. The author discusses demographics, including size of the community and its distribution, migration patterns, occupational careers and position in the labour market, integration and activities of Polish associations, both formal and informal ones.
Subiektywne odczucie dystansu kulturowego, przejawiające się między innymi w sposobie percepcji społeczeństwa przyjmującego przez imigrantów, wpływa na dystans społeczny, który decyduje o skuteczności i szybkości „wchodzenia” nowo przybyłych w społeczeństwo przyjmujące, dlatego warto badać wizerunek kraju przyjmującego i gospodarzy wśród imigrantów. Artykuł opisuje postrzeganie Islandii i Islandczyków przez polskich imigrantów na Islandii pod koniec pierwszej dekady XXI wieku. Na podstawie zrealizowanych w 2010 roku w Reykjaviku wywiadów zrekonstruowano opinie Polaków na temat islandzkiego klimat, krajobrazu oraz cech gospodarzy i ich typowych zachowań. Otrzymane wyniki porównano z historycznymi relacjami polskich podróżników oraz z wynikami badań na podobny temat zrealizowanymi dekadę wcześniej. Do analizy narracji imigrantów zastosowano kategorie Alfreda Schütza, dotyczące opisu świata społecznego przez obcego oraz pojęcie stereotypu.
EN
A subjective feeling of cultural distance, as evidenced e.g. in how the receiving society is perceived by immigrants, affects the social distance that determines the effectiveness and rate of “entry” of new arrivals into the receiving society. This makes it worthwhile to study the image of the receiving country and the host people as viewed by immigrants. This article describes the perception of Iceland and the Icelanders by Polish immigrants in Iceland at the end of the first decade of the 21st century. Based on interviews carried out in Reykjavik in 2010, we have reconstructed the opinions held by Poles on Iceland’s climate, landscape, and the features and typical behaviours of the host people. The results obtained were compared to historical accounts from Polish travellers and the results of studies on a similar topic carried out a decade earlier. To analyze the immigrants’ accounts we employed categories used by Alfred Schütz in his essay on “The Alien”, applicable to the description of a social environment by an outsider.
In the article I address Polish-Belarusian relations in the Białystok region in the second decade of the 21st century - twelve years since the adoption of an Act on national and ethnic minorities and regional language. I discuss changes brought about by the new legislation, how they are assessed by leaders of the minority group, and the possible impact of the bill on the sense of national identity among Belarusians in Poland. In the second part of the article, I describe the main conflict between the Polish majority and the Belarusian minority, which concerns the memory and commemoration of the so-called damned soldiers, and of one of them in particular: Romuald Rajs, alias “Bury”.
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