Research project „Globalising Upper Silesia. Migration from Rural Areas to Cities in the Global North, South and East“: Marcin Jarząbek and Zofia Strzyż (JU Kraków) and Andrzej Michalczyk (RUB Bochum) (Web)

Time: 18.-20.02.2027
Venue: Institute of History, Jagiellonian Univ. Kraków
Proposals by: 01.10.2026

In the mid-20th century, the world remained deeply divided – both politically and economically. The Iron Curtain, colonialism, and economic backwardness marked various boundaries. Yet in this divided world, the same process could be observed in various places: migration from rural areas to cities, and global urbanisation. Although this phenomenon has accompanied humanity ever since cities first emerged, from the 1930s onwards – and particularly after the Second World War – there was an unprecedented acceleration: the second, after nineteenth-century urbanisation, such a rapid and irreversible social change. During the workshop, we aim to examine this change from a grassroots perspective, focusing primarily on human experience – the ‘lives’ of those at the centre of migration processes, interwoven with political and economic contexts, as well as global change – the ‘system’ with its geopolitical and economic mechanisms.
The workshop, therefore, aims to analyse the processes by which ‘ordinary people’ enter urban, culturally heterogeneous social environments in various parts of the world. The global revolutionary transformation observed between the 1940s and 1970s affected ways of working, communicating, moving about and consuming, resulting in fundamental social changes. We believe that, despite specific contexts, this shared global experience of ‘becoming urban’ and/or ‘remaining rural’ can be identified, compared and summarised. We therefore wish to highlight the agency and actions of ‘ordinary people’ within these global processes and analyse them from a microhistorical perspective – drawing on biographical, local and intergenerational perspectives. We are interested in the origins of urban values and norms that we now take for granted, within politically and economically diverse systems. We encourage you to focus, amongst other things, on the functioning of the family, education, work, the consumption of goods and media, spatial and social mobility, discrimination and racism.
We invite researchers from various academic disciplines (including history, sociology, anthropology, migration studies, and economics) to submit proposals for presentations that fit within the framework outlined above and address one or more of the following topics: Continue reading →