Eastern Europe’s ‘Peripheral Whiteness’: Class and Gender Racialization

Chaired by: Professor Clare McManus (University of Glasgow)

In collaboration with University of Glasgow Central & East European Studies (CEES)

Abstract

In this talk, Dr Dominika Blachnicka-Ciacek and Dr Sylwia Urbańska will develop the concept of peripheral Whiteness in the context of Eastern Europeans, arguing that their position is characterized by conditional access to the privileges associated with Whiteness. Focusing on the example of Polish migrants in Western European labour markets and Polish returnees at Poland’s eastern borders, the talk will demonstrate how processes of racialization are deeply intertwined with dimensions of class and gender. In the context of East–West migration, the speakers will argue that while some individuals are able to pass as ‘middle-class White’, the majority experience a form of not-quite-Whiteness, marked by racial deficits in comparison to Western Whiteness, while simultaneously retaining the capacity to racialize other groups perceived as non-White. At the same time, the emergence of new migration routes to Europe via the Polish-Belarusian border, followed by the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the resulting influx of asylum seekers, has elevated the strategic importance of Poland’s eastern borderlands. In this context, Poles living in the eastern border regions, some of whom are returnees from Western Europe, increasingly participate in the construction of new racialized hierarchies that determine who, and on what grounds, can be admitted to the EU’s racialized community of value.

Read the Identities article: ‘Eastern Europe’s ‘peripheral whiteness’: class and gender racialization among Polish migrants and returnees’

This lecture will take place online. Please register to attend, and a joining link will be sent to you on the day of the event.

Dr Dominika Blachnicka-Ciacek is based in the Faculty of Sociology at the University of Warsaw. Her research and visual practice explore the role of memory, violence and racialization in shaping transnational belonging and exclusion among diaspora, refugee and migrant communities in European and Middle Eastern contexts. She currently leads a research grant, Engagement from Afar: A Multi-Sited Ethnography of the Ukrainian Diaspora’s Responses to War. In 2024-25, she was a visiting professor at Rutgers University, New Jersey, and is the recipient of the 2024 Minister of Higher Education’s Award for Outstanding Young Scholars. She holds a PhD in Visual Sociology from Goldsmiths, University of London.

Dr Sylwia Urbańska is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Economic Sociology in the Faculty of Sociology, University of Warsaw. Her research and publications focus on transformations in family life, intimacy and gender patterns in migration and rural communities. She was the Principal Investigator of the research grant, (Non-)Traditional Traditional? Transformations of Rural Families from Women's Perspectives, 1989–2019. She is the author of the book, Matka Polka na odległość (Mother Poland from a Distance) and co-author of the monograph, Poza granicami: płeć społeczno-kulturowa w katolickich organizacjach migracyjnych (Beyond Borders: Gender in Catholic Migrant Organizations).