Paper short abstract:

This paper explores emotional trajectories of first-generation Polish immigrants living in New York City. It investigates processes and emotions involved in forging and reshaping their sense of belonging; the focus is on transnational dynamics of immigrants' emotional attachments.

Paper long abstract:

This paper is based on ethnographic research on first-generation well-educated Polish immigrants living in New York City. It aims to explore the ways in which their emotional attachments has been shaped and transformed by the experience of migration. Special attention will be given to the transnational dynamics of immigrants' emotional trajectories. The focus will be on the following issues. What kind of emotions are involved in forging and sustaining a sense of belonging to the social settings embedded in the country of origin (e.g.love or moral obligation towards memebers of family, nostalgia, attachment to particular places, strong cultural identification and what kind of social actions do they prompt? What is the dialectical relationship between a sense of belonging to the country of settlement and of non-belonging to the country of origin, and how it has been changing? Then the processes of establishing emotional ties within the social and geograhical spaces of the country of settlement will be examined. Stress will be put on the informal networks as a relevant source of emotional support (the case of a group of friends who call themselves 'extended family' will be analysed). Migration entails, often dramatic, changes both in the life of those who migrate and those who are left behind. What are then emotional benefits and costs of migration? To what extent these emotions are shaped by social relations of transnational character? Are the liminality and ambiquity defining features of immigrants' experience and in what terms it is described by the people under investigation? The emotional trajectories of recent Polish immigrants have been strongly influenced by a wider political and economic context. The large-scale transformations of the last twenty years brought freedom of movement, easy access to fast means of transportation and communication and new structural constraints, in consequence, lives of immigrants and their emotional attachements have been reshaped once again.