As the year drew to a close, I reflected on my accomplishments and challenges.
Research and publications
My current research project is progressing. If you want to follow what I and my team are up to, subscribe to our blog here. Whenever possible, we publish our blog in English, Polish, and Ukrainian. We just published a post reviewing our activities in 2024 and looking forward to what 2025 might bring us, including the challenges we need to tackle.
Since we received our Ethics Committee's approval, we had conducted hundreds of interviews with migrant children attending Polish schools, their parents (mainly mothers), school principals and teachers, as well as civil society organizations working with migrant pupils in Poznań and Wrocław, and several smaller cities. The data we gathered is rich but the challenge is to transcribe the interviews in a timely manner and maintain a balance between data collection and data analysis.
And then there are publications.
Since I direct the project, I am responsible not only for my own publications but also for those of my team members. As a former editor-in-chief of International Migration, I like discussing ideas for papers with my team members and providing feedback on draft articles. However, it is challenging to keep young scholars, especially doctoral students, on task to ensure that they publish the required number of articles needed to receive a PhD. But despite sometimes playing the task-mistress, I have confidence in them!
One of my doctoral students and I had a nice end-of-year present in the form of an article on heritage language learning and maintenance published in Glottodidactica.
ABSTRACT. Children in migrant families are often torn between maintaining their heritage language and acquiring fluency in the language of the country where they reside. Knowledge of the majority language helps them succeed in school and find meaningful employment, while the ability to speak the heritage language facilitates communication within their families. However, acquiring competencies in both languages is not always easy. It is especially complicated in multigenerational families, and families where the parents speak different heritage languages. In schools, the dynamics differ depending on the number of speakers of particular heritage languages. In this paper, we analyze the dynamics within families and schools of children with at least one foreign-born parent. We ask who is responsible for the children’s facility with either or both languages and analyse ways of integration and exclusion of migrant children vis-à -vis the language/s they choose to speak. We explore these questions within grounded theory to identify emic and etic attitudes towards majority / minority languages. The empirical data come from ethnographic research with migrant children and their families, teachers, and teachers’ intercultural assistants conducted in Poznań and Wrocław.
You can read the whole paper here.
Working and living transnationally
Conducting research in Poland means that I live part-time in Poznań, a city of my birth. Don't get me wrong, it is always nice to return to my hometown and to my alma mater, the Adam Mickiewicz University. However, spending anywhere between six and eight months a year away from my family takes a toll. I miss my husband (also an anthropologist), my adult daughter, and my dogs. I try to reunite with my pack as often as I can, but that requires resources that my research grant does not include; I pay for those transatlantic flights out of my own pocket. I also finance my housing in Poland by myself. The Polish National Science Foundation does not provide housing allowance for researchers holding Polish citizenship, even when they are dual citizens and have not lived in Poland permanently for 40 years!
Anthropologists have written about the effects of field-based research career on family life and the challenges of conducting fieldwork and caring for children or aging parents. A lot less has been written about anthropologists working on soft money and chasing after research grants and contracts and how this work affects people's personal lives. I blogged on this site about the challenges of working on soft money (The post was read by over 800 people!), but if I was writing it today, I would add additional things about scholars who are also migrants themselves --- maybe in another post.
Reading
Read a lot. Deeply. And widely. (Viet Thanh Nguyen)
I obviously read as part of my job, but I also read fiction. I have always thought that reading novels helped my own writing. Viet Thanh Nguyen, one of my favorite novelists, once wrote about the importance of reading a lot, reading deeply, and widely. I stand by his maxim.
Every year I set a goal of how many novels I want to read. This past year my goal was 45 books, but I came up short... I read 42 novels. You can see my list here.
My obsession with Han Kang continued this past year. I was over the moon when she won the 2024 Nobel Prize in Literature for the "intense poetic prose . . . confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life."
In Human Acts Han Kang wrote:
After you died I could not hold a funeral, And so my life became a funeral.
I read her novel I Do Not Bid Farewell in Polish translation (Nie mówię żegnaj). The book recounts the tragic events of the Jeju April 3, 1948 massacre from the perspectives of three women. But the book is really about love.
Kang received the prestigious Prix Medicis for foreign literature in France for this novel. It was the first time a book by a South Korean author has received the prize.
I think what attracts me to Han Kang and Korean literature more generally are the historical similarities between Korea and Poland, the way she and other Korean writers deal with the painful past of the Japanese occupation and the struggle for independence.
Venturing into the graphic novel realm
I don't often read graphic novels, but I was drawn to Made in Korea by Jeremy Holt, because it was about a robotic child proxy created by a Korean programmer.
"The Korean coder who unwittingly gave Jessie her identity wants to locate her; her Texan adoptive parents want only to love her; and Jesse wants to understand who she is and where she belongs. As these forces come into violent conflict, a question hangs over Jessie: Who created you? Was it the people responsible for your body? The people you see each day? Was it you yourself? Or was it a collaboration of all those parties, each of us an accidental conglomerated partnership with strangers?"
Korean non-fiction
In 2024, I also read a few non-fiction books about Korea by Korean authors. One will stay with me for a long time--Flowers of Fire: The Inside Story of South Korea’s Feminist Movement and What It Means for Women’s Rights Worldwide by Hawon Jung.
Hwong Jung is a journalist, and much of the book consists of contemporary reportage; a very good reportage, I might add. Jung is a consummate interviewer and it shows in the rich narratives her interviewees shared. What's notable is that Flowers of Fire supplements this coverage with substantial historical research—research that illuminates how both sexism and the fight against it in South Korea are rooted in historical particularities.
Watching K-dramas
I am not very good at balancing work and life, but I do make time for Korean dramas. I had several favorites this year. You can follow me on Tumblr to see what I watch. I tend to gravitate towards dramas exploring social issues, but I also love me a good romcom!
Looking to the future
I am looking forward to returning to Poland at the end of January to continue my research and to continue writing a book based on the research--stay tuned for a separate blog post about the book.
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