Oscillating Whiteness: A Conceptual Framework for Analysing Transnational Ethno‐Racial Privilege

This article advances oscillating whiteness as a conceptual framework for analysing ethno‐racial privilege across geopolitical settings. The framework theorizes whiteness as a dynamic resource governed by four mechanisms: recognition (how bodies are classified as white), performativity (how whiteness is enacted through cultural scripts), conditionality (how privileges depend on favourable circumstances) and contestation (how racial boundaries are challenged and transformed). Drawing on the experiences of Polish nationals in domestic and Western European diaspora contexts, the article demonstrates how privilege oscillates through labour market hierarchies, national mythologies and political conjunctures, provincializing US‐centric paradigms by embedding whiteness within contexts of postsocialist transition. It specifies the axis of oscillation—attributed recognition moving around a group's structural baseline within intra‐European hierarchies—and the observable patterns the framework predicts and rules out. Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine illustrates recognition and conditionality operating at speed, as belonging is extended and rescinded under geopolitical pressure.