Migration and the Status of ‘Stranger’ in a Homologously Interpreted Local Space
Migration and the Status of ‘Stranger’ in a Homologously Interpreted Local Space

Summary/Abstract: ObjectivesThe aim of this article is empirical exploration of the dependence of the status of a ‘stranger’ on the local and social context. In that context s/he acts as a participant of migration process that represents dynamics of the locally relativised attributes of the environment / ‘localisation’. The thesis statement concerns the interference of constitutive ecological, organizational, cultural and symbolic dimensions into the social space.Material and methodsThus the paper verifies validity of the subsequent hypotheses that ‘environment’ (coexistent attributes, fields, characteristics) that constitute the configuration of the ‘homological structures’ as defined by Pierre Bourdieu and specific for particular local communities influences perception and attitude towards a stranger. TResultsThe operationalisation of such complex constructs, along with the contextualisation of the migration phenomenon involving the stranger-environment relationship, leads to the adoption of an interdisciplinary research perspective, that in addition to sociology includes geographic economy, demography and spatial statistics. The analysis of the aforementioned dependencies requires a multi-source database from various surveys and administrative data (the Local Data Bank of the Statistics Poland).ConclusionsThe results of the analyses confirm that the main determinant of the attitude towards a stranger (as a migrant) and their status in the changing environment is the local social space (interpreted in a homologous way).

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