VISION Note by Magdalena Nowicka and Piotr Goldstein
In the VISION Project, we are interested in whether people who share the physical space create convivial relationships. In other words, we want to know if those whose lives intersect, interact and care for each other. The focus of our research is the Polish-German border region, and we examine local contexts such as workplaces, public spaces or neighbourhoods. Through our patchwork ethnography (Günel and Watanabe 2024) and interviews, we have explored how these places are crossroads for people from Poland, Germany and Ukraine, but also other, more distant locations. They all utilise this space as workers, residents, or tourists, and in their various social roles as partners, parents, friends, hosts, or visitors. Their lifeworlds sometimes overlap and even more often remain separate (cf. Rijcken, Goldstein & Awuah 2025).
To shed light on how Polish transborder workers relate to others – Germans, Ukrainians and other nationals – in their places of residence and work, we asked our interviewees how often they met representatives of these three groups and whether they considered these encounters warm or cold. Beyond simply marking the warmth and frequency of meetings, our respondents commented on their choices, giving us insights into the social inequalities and historical legacies that shape such relationships. In this research note, we present the results of the preliminary analysis of 25 semi-structured individual interviews with Polish cross-border workers between September and December 2024.
Recommended citation: Nowicka, Magdalena, and Piotr Goldstein. 2025. “‘I Can’t Say These Are Bad People.’ How Polish Commuting Workers Feel about the Encounters with Germans, Ukrainians and Others.” VISION Notes 3 (1): 1–8. https://doi.org/10.13140/RG.2.2.19157.08168.