CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2015
| Author | Romuzga, Simone Rosalie |
|---|---|
| Title | "Get to Know Me Before You Throw Me Out": Exploring Agency in Migrant Narratives |
| Summary | Popular depictions of migrants around the world tend to create an image of the migrant as disempowered and dehumanized through the migration process. Often, this is a result of misinformed or politically charged media as well as an overly abstract academic literature, within which the voices of migrants themselves are rarely taken into account. This thesis will explore how agency is expressed in the narratives of migrants living in Warsaw, Poland, particularly through migrant life stories, in order to reveal an important nuance and perspective of migration that is often ignored. A temporal analysis of the migrants’ experiences supports the theoretical framework of the interdependence of structure and agency. Additionally, in portraying themselves as agents in control of their own lives, migrants find empowerment through the specificity of the migratory experience and the knowledge that has been picked up along the way. Poland, as a country with relatively few migrants, proves to be an important backdrop for migrants to exert greater agency in their environment, as they employ a ‘dual integration’ strategy to change the structural status quo in regards to negative perceptions of foreigners among the Polish population. |
| Supervisor | Rabinowitz, Dan; Li, Ju |
| Department | Sociology MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2015/romuzga_simone.pdf |
Visit the CEU Library.
© 2007-2021, Central European University