‘Walking Alongside’ Polish Migrants in Ireland: Individual Life Courses in the Context of Political, Social, and Economic Change

Abstract

Justyna Salamonska utilizes a qualitative panel study of Polish migrants in Dublin to follow life courses lived internationally. Starting with the retrospective accounts of a male and female Polish migrant, the following analysis ‘walks alongside’ the research participants in their lives during a succession of waves of interviews, with Ireland moving from economic boom to bust in the background. The chapter documents the temporal character of the settlement and mobility decision-making processes. The analysis also highlights how migrants construct and negotiate their life and professional paths at different time points, taking into account multiple factors, which can hardly be reduced to the labor migration arguments describing East-to-West intra-European migration.