Temporary Migration and Community Cohesion

the Nature and Impact of Migration from East-Central to Western Europe 

This workshop, held on 7 and 8 January 2008, was very successful in bringing together lecturers and postgraduates from around the country. Many of the lecturers had already met at conferences in 2007 and the workshop was helpful in consolidating and widening this group, which is beginning to establish a good sense of collective identity. Invitations to the workshop also revealed the existence of many postgraduate researchers around the UK. The workshop participants also included two community cohesion workers from Bristol City Council and Artur Stankiewicz from Polski Bristol, the local Polish website.

All the papers were of high quality (see programme) and were followed by lively discussions, in which all three categories of participant took part. Overall the workshop had coherence, and the overarching questions provided a loose framework, without constituting a straitjacket. There was a strong sense of sharing a common set of interests and working with a common agenda, and this is what made the discussions so valuable.

In addition to exploring many facets of the relationship between duration of stay and community cohesion, the discussions also covered the current state of research in Poland and the UK and some important methodological issues. The concluding session, following Dr Cieślińska’s paper, was particularly lively. Dr Cieślińska had suggested that in Eastern Poland emigration is seen as a sign of ‘failure’, and this sparked a debate about the different impressions of migration gained from interviews conducted in Poland and in the UK. This debate crystallised many of the ideas expressed in the course of the workshop, both about the causes of migration and also about the migration experience.

Overall, the CEELBAS objectives were clearly met. The workshop brought together a wide range of researchers, with some practitioners; postgraduate students were fully involved. Although a lot of research about East-West migration today focuses heavily on receiving communities, the Bath workshop also explored migration in sending communities. The importance of detailed, language-based research in these sending communities was highlighted.

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