Paper short abstract:

Using examples from the borderlands of western and southern Poland I show how mobile ethnography contributes to an explanation of the perception and multisensory experience of space and spatial identity and their influence on the rationalisation of life situations and social statuses.

Paper long abstract:

Emotional attachment to landscapes is a topic I dealt with during mobile ethnographic research among Poles settling in Germany and Ireland and among Jamaicans in Kingston, as well as among the Polish population living in Lower Silesia, which after 1945 replaced the displaced, mainly German population. I believe that the process of "growing into the space" is an indispensable phenomenon that determines the adaptation of newcomers (positively or negatively). This phenomenon also accompanies our growing up, recognizing the surroundings, landscape, and space as familiar. I have often wondered how to effectively research why we are attracted to certain spaces and why others make us anxious or even averse, and I reckon that mobile and multi-sited ethnography may bring an answer. For this paper, I discuss examples from research in Polish borderlands that were settled by Polish people after 1945 (replacing displaced Germans), and only in the 21st century did they begin to settle in greater numbers outside Poland. I review the process of rationalising the imaginaries of the right to live there in the context of nationalist historicism and the process of younger generations abandoning historicism in favor of non-nationalistic, personal emotional attachment to places. In the case of people crossing the border (e.g. on the way from work to home in a neighboring country), I will discuss the process of losing the "sense of border" and entering a foreign territory, which may evoke a sense of belonging to space and locality, rather than nationality.