Migrant Men's Fathering Narratives, Practices and Projects in National and Transnational Spaces: Recent Polish Male Migrants to London

Abstract

Historically migrants have been constructed as units of labour and their social reproductive needs have received scant attention in policy and in academic literature. The growth in ‘feminist‐inflected’ migration research in recent decades, has provoked a body of work on transnational care‐giving that poses a challenge to such a construction, at least as it relates to female migrants in general and mothers in particular. Researchers, however, have demonstrated less interest in how migrant men give meaning to and perform their fathering roles. Such neglect is increasingly problematic in the context of rising social, political and academic interest in the significance of fathering in European (and other) societies. With the purpose of making a preliminary contribution to knowledge on migrant men's fathering narratives, practices and projects, this article draws on findings from interviews conducted with recent migrants from Poland to the UK. By focusing on migrant fatherhood, we add to the understanding of transnational care‐giving by illuminating the many parallels between migrant mothering and fathering. Our findings are consistent with much of the literature on transnational mothering, highlighting tensions between breadwinning and parenting and the various strategies fathers deploy to reconcile these tensions. Nevertheless, we find that migrant men's fathering narratives, practices, and projects, while challenging the construction of male migrants as independent and non‐relational, remain embedded within the dominant framework of the gendered division of labour. More uniquely, the article also demonstrates the importance of situated transnational analyses, in this case the institutional arrangements between the UK and European Union new Member States, which gave the Polish migrants privileged labour market access and social rights within the UK's highly differentiated migration regime. This access allowed mobility, settlement and or family reunion according to the migrant's specific circumstances and preferences with respect to the labour market and parenting.

Caught between breadwinning and emotional provisions - the case of Polish migrant fathers in Norway

“…Quite an important methodological note is that mothers were largely more willing to be interviewed and share their experiences of family migration, and they were also significantly more present in the places of recruitment. This finding is concurrent with the general difficulties in accessing men and fathers for other research projects concerning family, as noted by McKee and O'Brien (1983), Letherby (2003: 100-101;1993), and Kilkey, Plomien and Perrons (2013) -the last in the Polish context. Conclusively, while collecting narratives for this study was embedded in a small-scale approach which is by no means generalizable, the findings address a clearly under-researched theme in the scholarship on Polish family migrations seen from the fathers' perspective, even more novel in the context of the Norwegian destination society.…”

The Interview in Migration Studies: A Step towards a Dialogue and Knowledge Co-production?

“…Conducted by female researchers who responded to the neglect of fathering experiences in transnational migration, this research focused on "fathering narratives, practices, and projects of migrant men" (Kilkey et al 2014: 178), utilizing inquiry design and questions typically used in researching motherhood and its transnational practices. The study shows that when asked the same questions usually asked of women, men do reflect on and actively engage with issues of distant fatherhood, despite the relative silence in migration studies on these issues (Kilkey et al 2014). These examples reveal one of the main advantages of the interview as a method: it creates possibilities for expanding and refining one's original research agenda, adding previously unnoticed elements into research design, while gaining a fresh perspective on the roles and perspectives of the actors.…”

Transnational parenthood and forced migration: the case of asylum-seeking parents who are forcibly separated from their families by immigration laws

“…(Rudo,female,39) Interviews with fathers were equally heavily characterised by expressions of failure, guilt and shame, yet male asylum-seekers' sentiments were mainly related to their inability as fathers to financially provide for the children left behind. In the context of economic migrants, remittances provide insights into the issue of power dynamics within transnational family relations whereby fathers may choose to withhold sending money to their children as a form of 'distant disciplining' (Kilkey et al, 2014). In contrast, asylum fathers communicated a genuine failure to satisfy their traditional breadwinning role that was routinely experienced as a loss of 'one's masculinity' (Rask et al, 2014).…”