Ewa Nowicka-Rusek will focus on contemporary migration from Ukraine to Poland, its social and cultural consequences beyond mutual economic profits. The number of Ukrainian labour immigrants in Poland (counted in difficult, numerous medical restrictions, of pandemic year 2020 according to official data of GUS (Statistics Poland). Ukrainian immigrants constitute the majority (64,2%) among total number of foreign citizens living in Poland – 1 351 418 persons. The situation may suggest that Poland will develop in the direction of multicultural country, that is definitely new kind of socio-cultural transformation. Nowicka-Rusek wants to look into the pros and cons of multiculturalism in Poland. The following issues will be addressed: the scale and character of the Ukrainian labour and educational migration and hierarchical character of mutual relations – memories of the Polish domination in old times and dramatic conflict as factors working against contemporary good relations. Further, the processes which lead to today’s political situation and struggle for the equal position in the common life in the Polish society and forgetting the past. Finally, the comparison will be made with the position of Vietnamese immigrants: similar values and different history of mutual relations, contacts and constant immigration.

Marjan Ivković will present his research on the form of symbolic domination that Kosovo Albanians were subjected to during the period of socialist Yugoslavia. With two other sociologists, Ivković conducted a critical discourse analysis of the reporting of influential Serbian printed media (Politika, Borba, Večernje novosti) on the protests of Kosovo Albanians in 1968, 1981 and 1988, and argued that the media reporting performed a “discursive reduction” of these protests – which were motivated by both socio-economic and national grievances – to mere expressions of Albanian nationalism and separatism (Ivković, Prodanović and Trifunović, 2015; Ivković, Prodanović and Trifunović, 2019). This form of symbolic domination had the immediate aim of neutralizing the strong threat to the legitimacy of Yugoslav socialism that a socio-economically motivated protest posed, but it also had a long-term detrimental effect of the “internalization” of media representations, in the sense that it became increasingly more difficult (over the period of 1968-88) for the protesting Kosovo Albanians to articulate their demands in any other terms than those of identity politics. Ivković also suggests that this form of domination can be interpreted from the perspective of critical theory, as the neutralization of the “normative surplus” of Yugoslav socialism, in the sense of its potential to provide semantic resources for rearticulating the long-standing ethnic hostility between Serbs and Albanians in the language of social justice, rather than that of identity politics.