This book contributes to our understanding of how older learners negotiate family internal and family external socialisation processes and thereby how parents' ideologies and practices, peer socialisation, and language status or societal demands come together in adolescents' lives. It integrates the sociohistorical context and adolescents' attitudes with the parents' role. Through the use of 'small stories' and ethnographic observation this book explores the social and cultural worlds of Polish immigrant adolescents in Ireland, the ways they seek membership and belonging in their communities of practice, and the ways in which they develop sociohistorical understandings across the languages and cultures they are part of. It sheds light on schooling and family communities and the role they play in the socialization processes of immigrant children.

Despite extensive and continuous academic interest in migrant and transnational families, a stereotypical view that those leading mobile lives are somehow beyond the contours of normativity is still prevalent. Such a perspective concerns both kinship and family practices of “familyhood” across borders, and the bi- or multicultural settings of providing or offering care. Consequently, we primarily hear about migration leading to broken relationships, the dissolution of families and bonds, substandard provisions of care, abandonment, exploitation of employees and so on. In this climate of public imagination of migrants either being “dangerous” or concurrently stealing one’s job and scrounging off the welfare state, it is no small feat to be a migration scholar. Trying to overcome the universalising views that essentialise human experience requires a wholly different point of departure, one which is represented in this volume. This is because a now well-established transnational paradigm allows for a more nuanced analysis, originating with the premise that not only normalises mobility, but also proves that various ties and relationships can be continued in the long-term despite spatial distance. On the whole, the transnational lens provided here showcases how new family practices are devised and deployed in mobile family lives, thus allowing the argument that migration enriches certain dimensions of contemporary family life and caregiving. This book plays on the dichotomy of migration as “the new normal” and mobility as a continuous source of challenges. The core issues examined here concern such problems as maintaining kinship ties across borders, new patterns of mothering and fathering, children’s sense of belonging and identifications, and social capital and engagement in community life. It reveals that “doing family” in the migration context often eludes simple definitions of national space or typical family. Instead, it offers a transnational understanding of how a person practically and pragmatically arranges one’s family and kinship, strategically choosing pathways of care, child-rearing, relationships at home, maintaining traditions and so forth.

In an era of increased transnationalism, cultural and linguistic diversity has become a prominent feature of Irish society. Between the years of 1995 and 2008, Ireland experienced high rates of inward migration for the first time, which has subsequently led to an emerging second generation of migrants in Ireland (Röder, Ward, Frese, & Sánchez, 2014). While the Polish community is the largest non-Irish group in Ireland, little is known yet about the unique linguistic and cultural challenges faced by Polish migrant and transnational families in Ireland. Family language policy (FLP) research depicts "how languages are managed, learned and negotiated within families" (King, Fogle, & Logan-Terry, 2008, p. 907). FLP studies of migrant and transnational families in Ireland are limited and the current study aims to explore how individual members within Polish families in Ireland jointly construct and negotiate FLP in the home domain. The current study contributes to the field of FLP by being inclusive of the voices of children as active agents in their language use and learning. An ethnographic approach employing qualitative methods within a constructivist paradigm was deemed the most appropriate way to investigate FLP formation and negotiation in the home domain. The theoretical framework adopted for the research sought to analyse how language socialisation processes and ethnolinguistic identity construction interact with the language ideologies, practices and management strategies of parents and children. The influence of multiple forces on FLP formation, both inside the home and at wider societal level (Curdt-Christiansen, 2014, 2018; Spolsky, 2004) were also considered in the research. The study comprised two phases of research. During the first phase, a qualitative focus group interview and six individual interviews were conducted with Polish migrant and transnational parents (n=12). These findings informed the development of the second phase of the research, constituting ethnographic case studies of five families. Participant sampling reflected different family structures including two-parent families, a single-parent family and transnational families living between Poland and Ireland. Data collection methods included interviews, observations in the home, audio and video recordings and reflective language diaries. Thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2006, 2012) was employed to analyse the data. The findings revealed the inextricable link between language and identity formation among family members. The findings also demonstrated how FLP is continuously being negotiated and reconstructed to suit the everchanging needs and circumstances of migrant and transnational families.

In a vivid account of every stage of the migration process, this topical book presents new research that looks in-depth at Polish migration to the UK, in particular the lives of working-class Polish families in the West of England.

This book discusses little-known linkages between two seemingly distant peoples, the Polish and the Irish, whose historical experiences share important similarities. Both Ireland and Poland have been subject to foreign rule, which they overturned in 1916 and 1918 respectively. Their predominantly Catholic societies were among the first to grant voting rights to women a century ago. This volume uses the centenary of both Ireland and Poland (re)gaining national independence and the political empowerment of women in these countries as a point of departure to analyse selected aspects of Polish and Irish people’s struggle for autonomy. Cases of mutual assistance, including the awareness-raising campaigns organized by Western women in support of the independence and suffragist movements in Poland, are presented along with examples of grassroots self-organization, foreign press coverage, and military and diplomatic efforts to empower the Poles and the Irish.