Eventful Summer

Summer blooms are fading

As we welcome a new academic year, we also reflect on our summer activities, both project-related and the fun stuff.

Katarzyna writes:

The summer is now definitely over, but what an eventful summer it was! For me, its beginning was marked by an extended working trip to Scotland, where I took part in the International Society for Ethnology and Folklore (SIEF) Congress in Aberdeen. The biennal congress was hosted by the Elphinstone Institute from the 3rd to the 6th of June 2025 and attracted hundreds of scholars from around the world, including a strong representation of our Department of Anthropology and Ethnology in Poznań and the CeBaM team.

The central theme was 'unwriting' with a view to seek or restore social justice, dismantle hegemonic frameworks, to honor and cede space to bottom-up research and analysis and facilitate more equitable scholarly texts. The congress also provided an opportunity to explore undocumented social and material practices of unwriting in practice-based, multi-media, multi-sensual research, incorporating the input of valued partners. I presented as part of the panel titled: From research with children to new ethnographic approaches: (un)writing dominance in research relationships. My paper discussed collaborative research with migrant children based on engagement with literature as a generative research design for unmoderated, unmediated ethnography, and description of children’s lives. Within the novel workshop format we developed as part of our project, I used the poem Kavka v metru (Jackdaw in the Subway) by a Czech writer Marie Iljašenko (b. 1983 in Kyiv) as a springboard for group discussion, question-response games and individual writing sessions centered around the experience of place and belonging. The workshops, which involved 118 high-school age research partners, yielded rich ethnographic audio-visual and textual material and enabled analysis of multiple emerging themes.

The following week, I travelled further north to join a self-funded week-long writing retreat at Scotland’s National Writing Centre Moniack Mhor . Based in the beautiful Scottish Highlands, the centre runs courses, workshops and one-to-one tutorials in a range of genres, tutored by some of the finest authors in the UK and beyond. The Writing Myth, Fiction and Poetry for children and adults residential course was led by the writer and storyteller Daniel Morden, whose repertoire ranges from profound Greek myths to magical fairy tales, thrilling adventures to absurd nonsense, and the poet and novelist Catherine Fisher, known for her books for children and young people, with Dimitra Fimi, Professor of Fantasy and Children’s Literature and Co-Director of the Centre for Fantasy and the Fantastic at the University of Glasgow joining as a Guest Reader.

The rest of the summer was no less creative, with three members of our team (Elżbieta, Katarzyna and Wiktoria) directly involved in workshops and writing up of a special issue proposal for International Migration. We are happy to announce that our proposal has been accepted and that I, together with professor Marie Louise Seeberg from the Norwegian Social Research ( NOVA), Oslo Metropolitan University (OsloMet), Norway, as co-editors are now busy leading the internal review of articles to be included in the special issue of the journal, titled Migrancy at School: Children and Young People Between Inclusion and Exclusion.

Towards the end of the summer, Professor Natalia Bloch from CeBaM and I, have put together and submitted a four-paper panel proposal for the next year’s IMICOE conference. The proposed panel Grassroots mobilization and knowledge production in a war-zone buffer country aims to explore the knowledge that has emerged since 2022 through engaged, activist, action-oriented, and participatory research during the two crises at the Polish-Belarusian and Polish-Ukrainian border, by focusing on the potential of fine-grained ethnographic tracing of engagement to study forced mobility in polycrisis situations.

A few words from Wiktoria:

Summer has come to an end, yet it brought so much good with it. It gave me the space I needed for reflection and allowed me to spend extra time reading, relaxing, and simply slowing down.

Research-wise, this summer was mainly about writing, with a few short breaks for observations, follow-up meetings, and conversations with my research partners. I used this calm and focused time to summarize my field notes and interviews, which helped with writing. I am happy to report that I am very close to completing two more papers based on my research with migrant parents in Poznan.

I also used this period to prepare for the annual conference of the Komitet Badań nad Migracjami

PAN, where I presented a paper “Migrant Parents at the Intersection of Vulnerability and the Demands of Poland’s Education System” – based on an article, co-authored with Professor Izabella Main and published earlier this year.

On a personal note, I took this time to rest, surrounded by literature, Polish nature, and moments

shared with friends and family. One of my summer highlights was attending Festiwal Góry

Literatury—a literature and cultural event held each year in Dolny Śląsk - a western region of Poland. Even during my short stay, I found lots of inspiration through encounters with new books, thought-provoking discussions and being in the mountains. I also made time to swim in the lake and fully embrace the long summer days—simple moments that reminded me how essential rest is, and how differently (and better) my mind works afterwards. As every year, summer ended too quickly, but I feel I used it well—recharged, inspired, and ready for the final year of my PhD and our project.

Larysa's reflection:

Time for a change of perspective

Summer this year was three months long, and for many people it probably flew by as usual, but for me, it was the shortest summer of my life. I juggled recovery from a hand injury with my duties as a PhD student nearing the finish line.

My summer began on my way to Krakow for the First Conference of Children and Youth, entitled "Listen to My Story..." – Polish Schools and the Migration Experience in the Eyes of Students and Students Coming to Poland from Other Countries held on June 2, 2025. This event was organized for children and by children, with support from adults. The topics discussed at the conference were remarkably "adult" despite the fact that the speakers were children and young people. Much was said about the need for respect, dialogue, changing attitudes, and combating stereotypes toward children with migration experience. I am pleased that initiatives for participatory practices and advocacy are emerging in Poland. Participating in this conference provided me with an opportunity to observe children's self-advocacy, which I plan to explore in my next article.

How will I remember this summer?

Mainly as a time of reaching a new level of resilience. On the one hand, I felt like I'd experienced the full cycle of "doctoral life" several times over the past three months, when my mind whirled from "I can't do anything, I know nothing" to "I'm inspired by what I read" or "I've never thought about this issue this way," to the moment when I finally "put my thoughts down on virtual paper" and organized them into an article. I'm currently finalizing this text and planning to submit it for publication soon.

On the other hand, I also tried to carve out time for myself. I read books unrelated to my doctoral thesis, rode my bike regularly, explored new suburban areas, and visited the open-air city garden and the newly built saltworks tower. My passion for arranging diamond pictures, due to the limitations of manual labor, had been reduced to mere bookmarks, but it nevertheless brought me joy without diminishing their beauty. To feel confident that despite my hand injury, I was on the right track and that after rehabilitation I would be able to return to work as a neurophysiotherapist, I also reached for new books on topics related to my original profession.

Reading Olga Tokarczuk

Becoming acquainted with the incredibly rich world of imagination in Olga Tokarczuk's books made an unforgettable impression on me. I read several short stories, and I felt I understood the characters' experiences: the feeling of being lost in a new and unfamiliar world (Professor Andrews in Warsaw), the ability to adapt to new living conditions and discover inner strength (The Island), and the importance of regaining one's voice (The Journey of the People of the Book). This last story resonated strongly with the theme of "losing and regaining one's voice," to which I devoted an article on the self-advocacy of Ukrainian children.

In summary

When I think about this summer, I see not only effort or fatigue, but also a quiet satisfaction. I realized that sometimes the most important changes happen when it seems like nothing is happening, and that pace doesn't always matter, as long as the direction remains the same.

I'm facing my final year at the Doctoral School, and I'm increasingly convinced that a doctorate is not a sprint, but a marathon, in which perseverance is paramount over speed.

What helps you maintain not only the usual "life-work balance", but also a balance between ambition and self-care?

And a few words from Elżbieta:

Like Katarzyna, I began my summer with a conference on migration to and from Poland held in London in June 2025. I wrote about the conference and my attempt to mix work with a bit of fun on my personal blog. A few weeks after the trip to London, I returned to Washington DC, my home for the past 40 years, to devote the rest of this year to completing a book manuscript stemming from our research on migrant children in Polish schools.

However, my first writing assignment of the summer was a text for a special issue of International Migration on migrancy at school. My contribution centers on inclusion and exclusion of Polish citizen children from interethnic families in Polish schools. I interrogate the paradoxes of how these children are treated in school. While they speak Polish, all grew up in bilingual or multilingual families, have dual citizenship, and attended very different schools. I juxtapose the perspectives presented in interviews with educators with the viewpoints expressed by the children and their parents. In the former, these children are conceptualized as “our children,” members of Polish society that speak Polish and receive support from their parents. The latter suggest that many of these children need help mastering academic Polish and adjusting to new school communities. The findings indicate much needed changes in the Polish educational system.

The work on my book manuscript is progressing. As of this writing, I have completed eight chapters; four more to go. You can see the TOC in one of my previous blog posts. As I write, I also read about writing, especially Kristen Ghodsee's excellent book From Notes To Narratives. This book is always on my desk to consult and remind me about what ethnographic writing should look like. I am also reading Paul Atkinson's Writing Ethnographically.

And of course, I also read for pleasure. I am a milieu reader, among other things. My husband and I are planning a spring trip to Ireland, his ancestral homeland, and I embarked on a reading project of Irish literature.

I began with Claire Keegan. Her prose is sparse and at times seems very simple, but it is so eloquent. Her themes are dark but beautiful nevertheless.

In the midst of all the writing and reading I managed to fit in a week at the beach on the Eastern Shore of the United States with my human and canine family. We had lots of fun eating seafood, walking on the beach, and chatting. My adult daughter lives in New York City and I don't get to see her too often so it is always a treat to be with her.

That's all for now. Back to writing and reading....