Izabella Main

• Doctor of Philosophy
• Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań

In the text, I analyze the participation of students and parents in the everyday world of a primary school in Washington D.C., USA. Based on observation, unstructured interviews and autoethnography, I analyzed three aspects that I considered most important for my experience as a parent and my daughter as a student: welcoming a child to school and c...

Precarity is defined as precarious existence, lacking in predictability, job security, material or psychological welfare. In migration studies, precarity is often associated with low wages, “illegality” and “deportability.” Based on field research, this article focuses on Polish nurses working in Norway. As health professionals and citizens of the...

This article analyses mobility of Polish women living transnational lives between Poland and Norway. The emphasis is on the emic (insider’s) versus etic (outsider’s) points of view regarding issues of migrant identity, mobility before arriving in Norway, and temporality, permanence, fluidity and settlement after moving to Norway. The article is bas...

Od 2015 roku w reakcji na „kryzys uchodźczy” – przybycie wielu tysięcy osób uciekających przed skutkami konfliktu w Syrii do Europy – przedstawiciele partii Prawo i Sprawiedliwość oraz polskiego rządu przyjęli negatywny stosunek do uchodźców, a w wielu polskich mass mediach pojawił się antyuchodźczy przekaz łączący zjawiska terroryzmu, „zagrożenia...

New forms of solidarity are being shaped as a response to the European “refugee crisis. ” The states have not been able to implement any viable or sustainable solution to the crisis, but the solidarity movement has been very visible and active in many European countries and rejected in others. This paper focuses on Poland, a country that gave birth...

This book explores how the rising numbers of refugees entering Europe from 2015 onwards played into fears of cultural, religious, and ethnic differences across the continent. The migrant, or refugee crisis, prompted fierce debate about European norms and values, with some commentators questioning whether mostly Muslim refugees would be able to adhe...

Research on skilled migrants often focuses on the negative effects of migration on sending countries. Discussions of positive results are limited to monetary remittances. Using ethnographic data, we explore the impact of mobility on the creation of new opportunities in Poland. We argue that Polish women bring back, not only financial resources, but...

Post-accession Female Mobility between Poland and Norway. New Trends and New Ways of Thinking about Migration This paper presents recent research on Polish female migration to Norway. We focus our discussion of existing literature on this subject on issues of gendered migration trajectories, children and adult education, career paths of migrant wo...

This paper focuses on the diversity in patients’ experience of bio-medicine and contrasts it with the normative view characteristic of health professionals. Ethnographic fieldwork among Polish migrant women in London, Barcelona and Berlin included interviews about their experiences with local healthcare and health professionals. Themes drawn from t...

This article focuses on individual perceptions that shape migration decisions and investigates how the process of migration or settlement itself is framed by a variety of personal considerations. It is a comparative study of Polish female migrants in Barcelona and Berlin who moved for the sake of economic and educational opportunities, because of f...

Marta,1 a 31-year-old Polish woman who had been living in Berlin for more than seven years and was married to a German coworker, was 32 weeks pregnant when it was confirmed that her baby boy was in the breech position. It was Marta’s first pregnancy. The child was very much anticipated by the couple, who were very aware and reflective, and put in a...

The article discusses the medical travel (medical tourism) of Polish women migrants based on a study conducted between 2008 and 2011 on Polish women who migrated to London, Barcelona, and Berlin. The author argues that the principal reasons for medical travel to Poland are the lower costs of private treatment, the relatively easy access to speciali...

This article analyses migration narratives of a small group of Polish female “repeat migrants” currently residing in Barcelona. Before settling there they lived in at least three other countries. I argue that repeat migrants experience many challenges: learning multiple languages, integrating into multiple labour markets, building multiple social n...

The article introduces contemporary medical anthropology. It describes the key concepts used by anthropologists to analyse practices related to health, sickness and healing. It examines the main approaches (interpretative approach, critical approach and cultural phenomenology) and follows the methodological trend of combining micro and macro levels...

The author analyzes the organization and activities of Catholic student groups during and after the communist period in Poland as an example of the transformation of religious life in response to the challenges of modernity. She argues that the student groups organized by Dominican fathers in Poznań and Kraków were the avant-garde of the Catholic C...

This chapter analyses the ways in which the communist regime in Poland created and propagated the cult of Boleslaw Bierut. The Polish Communist party faced a formidable obstacle in seeking to legitimise its rule in Poland. The party at the end of the war was numerically small and had only a very limited base of popular support. It had been devastat...