Contribution short abstract:

Drawing on longitudinal visual research of everyday migrant activism this paper seeks to better understand and theorise various activist engagements of transborder workers in the Polish-German border zone and recent migrants in Berlin-Brandenburg region.

Contribution long abstract:

In the VISION Project we work both with people who still leave in Poland and commute every day to warehouses and factories in Brandenburg, and those who have recently moved to Germany, but often keep strong ties to Poland and go back on very regular basis. We conduct ethnography and interviews and use collaborative artistic methods to better understand this geographically broad and socially diverse field. My particular interest in the project lies in tracing informal, everyday engagements of our research participants. In doing so, I draw from my earlier research on everyday activism, everyday migrant activism and using (longitudinal) visual ethnography to 'visualise' these, otherwise mostly invisible, engagements (Goldstein 2017, 2021, 2025-forthcoming; Goldstein & Lorenz 2019, 2022).

Engaging in an artistic collaborative project with them and tracing their life stories and histories of their often 'everyday' activism allows us to notice and better understand the broad spectrum and discreet forms of their social engagement on both sides of the border. It also sheds new light on their relationships not only with their compatriots and the host community but also with Ukrainian refugees, who are still an often overlooked but important actor in the Polish-German border region.