Paper short abstract:

Using an ethnographic approach and analyzing life-stories of Polish doctors currently living and working in Sweden, we discuss the personal, existential and emotional impact of migration on their professional identity, their socioeconomic conditions and the practices of their every-day lives.

Paper long abstract:

We discuss life-stories of Polish doctors currently living and working in Sweden, with a special focus on the personal and emotional aspects of migration and by the use of cultural analysis, narrative analysis and theories on spatial mobility. Doctors represent a seemingly universal profession, with similar training and skills all over the world. At the same time, every society's health care has some special cultural characteristics, traditions and hierarchies, reproduced and negotiated in the daily medical practice. A doctor's professional status is to some degree dependent on his/her country of origin and medical training, and our interviewees - high-skilled specialists - have experienced initial de-skilling, confusion and decrease in status in the new country. We analyze how individuals moving among different societies and occupational sub-cultures make sense of migration and what they inscribe as important personal and existential insights. The stories oscillate between inventiveness and competence on the one hand, and the feelings of uncertainty and alienation on the other. The doctors tell about their different ways of making sense of "cultural" and socioeconomic specificities, occupational subcultures, legitimate social behaviour and practices of every-day life in another country. They talk about their endeavour to cope, both as professionals and as private persons, and their ways to seek an existential and emotional balance. As this is a study about occupational culture and migration among highly skilled professionals, it will on an overall level enable an analysis of the relations between personal experiences, spatial mobility, transnational occupational culture and the complexity of cultural processes.