Janusz Mucha

The article deals with the integration processes of Polish native inhabitants of Kraków and the newest (since 2014) migrants from Ukraine (70–100,000 in a city of about 800,000). One of the main actors in these processes are municipal public cultural institutions.

Using a number of methods, the needs of the Ukrainian population in Kraków were assessed and the offer of the local public institutions was studied. A focus group, IDIs, analysis of websites, Facebook profiles, and participatory observation were used. A basic problem for migrants is finding information on the local cultural offer presented in Ukrainian or Russian. Kraków does much to include foreigners into its social life. However, still closer integration, taking advantage of the potential of migrants, would be instrumental to making their life better and to making the city even more attractive to its Polish and non-Polish inhabitants and tourists. Premises and other resources at the disposal of Ukrainian private institutions are too small for large-scale cultural activity. Kraków’s cafes and pubs help, organizing concerts and meet-the-author and meet-the-artist sessions, but these events could be better organized by public cultural institutions, inviting much larger audiences. Sometimes leading Ukrainian artists visit Kraków and turn to municipal institutions looking for support and employment, only to find neither. It would be very beneficial for the city to monitor these initiatives, via Kraków’s Ukrainian websites and Facebook profiles, and take advantage of them.

The proposed analysis of settlement practices is to contribute to the current research on recent international migration. It takes into account the role of important groups that are culturally, ethnically and religiously close to migrants, which itself is innovative and the research will be carried out in locations which, due to their “tradition” of ethnic diversity and the process of “unfinished” urbanization, provide a unique social background for the analysis of factors that may influence the processes of settlement, including: the creation of social anchors, adaptation strategies, integration processes and identity transformations.

The category of “intermediary groups” plays a key role in this project. We are interested in its impact on settlement processes and its theoretical relationship with other concepts used in this proposal. Moreover, we believe that research material collected in the field study will provide us with data that will allow us to construct a typology of settlement practices. We intend to find out whether the category of “intermediary group” is a factor helping us to explain settlement strategies and the development of other important processes related to the phenomenon of migration.

Academic international mobility is a long-lasting phenomenon and important aim of public policies in numerous countries. Scholarly debate usually concentrates on Western countries and some Eastern Asian scientifi c hubs like Singapore. Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) is understudied. In Poland, the largest CEE country, unlike in many  Western countries, public policies concerning internationalization of the academic fi eld are still under construction. Nevertheless, there is a strong pressure for internationalization. The Polish case to be discussed in this article can serve as an example of academic migration to less economically privileged regions that are usually countries of emigration of scholars rather than immigration. In this paper, by means of qualitative in-depth interviews, we concentrate on the need to invite academics from abroad and the perceptions of the actual presence of foreign scholars, employed full-time, as seen by their Polish supervisors. Geographical focus of this paper (CEE) and adopted  perspective (interviews with heads of departments supported by interviews with academics) bridge the gap in the literature on academic mobility.