A Bourdieusian concept of cultural capital is used to investigate the transformations and contestations of migrants’ cultural capital. Research often treated migrants’ cultural capital as reified and ethnically bounded, assuming they bring a set of cultural resources from the country of origin to the country of migration that either fit or do not fit. Critiquing such ‘rucksack approaches’, I argue that migration results in new ways of producing and re-producing (mobilizing, enacting, validating) cultural capital that builds on, rather than simply mirrors, power relations of either the country of origin or the country of migration. Migrants create mechanisms of validation for their cultural capital, negotiating both ethnic majority and migrant institutions and networks. Migration-specific cultural capital (re-)produces intra-migrant differentiations of gender, ethnicity and class, in the process creating modes of validation alternative to national capital.The argument builds on case studies of skilled Turkish and Kurdish migrant women in Britain and Germany.
This article explores how migrants utilize and access different forms of capital. Using a Bourdieusian approach to capital, we focus on how migrants’ temporal and spatial journeys are shaped by and in turn shape their opportunities to mobilize resources and convert them into capitals. These processes depend on migrants’ social positioning, including their gender, class, ethnic and national positioning, as well as citizenship status, and how this is articulated in relation to different fields in different spatial and temporal contexts. Drawing upon our combined corpus of data on migration to the UK, and a lesser extent Germany, with third country nationals and EU citizens and new data collected since the Brexit referendum, we examine these issues through biographical approaches to migrant women’s life stories. In so doing, we build theory on capital accumulation as dynamic, multi-level and spatio-temporally contingent.
The linkage between race and migration, especially in the UK since the 1990s, has shifted from a focus on postcolonial migrants to focus on newer groups, while migration within the European Union has also altered the discussion of racism and migration. This critical review provides a framework for understanding how race is conceptualized (or ignored) in contemporary scholarship on migration. We identify three, partly overlapping nexi between migration and racialization: (1) 'Changing Migrations -Continuities of Racism'; (2) 'Complex Migrations -Differentialist Racialization'; (3) 'Post-racial Migrations -Beyond Racism'. The article analyses what each of these nexi bring into focus as well as what they neglect. The concept of race-migration nexus aids a fuller understanding of how migration and contemporary racialization are co-constructed. Scholars need to consider the relationship between migration and race to better address pressing issues of racism against migrants and settled communities.
This article suggests reframing the study of migrant women's mothering from a question of integration to an engagement with citizenship. Drawing on research with Polish migrants to the UK, it illustrates how migrant mothers and children construct complex belongings, referencing local, national (UK and Polish), transnational and supra-national levels of belonging. Migrant mothers' sense of ethnic distinctness goes hand in hand with universalistic discourses of belonging. The notion of competent mothering is a key aspect constituting the migrant mothers' narratives of 'good citizenship'. Their narratives challenge the devaluing of their mothering practices as migrants, negotiating not only national but also class and racialized identities so that the figure of the well-educated Polish child symbolizes legitimate mobility and belonging. The article concludes by developing elements of a research agenda on migrant women's mothering as a citizenship practice.
Reflecting on the transformative potential of participatory theatre methods for social research, the article draws on a project with ethnically diverse migrant mothers in London. The research reframes the experiences and practices of socially and ethnically marginalized migrant mothers as active interventions into citizenship. We also challenge recurring public discourses casting migrant mothers as threats to social and cultural cohesion who do not contribute but instead draw on the resources of the welfare state. We highlight how participatory theatre methods create spaces for the participants to enact social and personal conflicts. It also validates migrant mothers' subjugated knowledges of caring and culture work creating new forms of citizenship. By enacting different versions of collective stories, the theatre sessions therefore become rehearsals for socio-political transformations.
This article critically discusses the experiences of women who are seeking asylum in the North East of England and women who are mothers with no recourse to public funds living in London to address the questions posed by the special issue. It argues both epistemologically and methodologically for the benefits of undertaking participatory arts-based, ethno-mimetic, performative methods with women and communities to better understand women’s lives, build local capacity in seeking policy change, as well as contribute to theorizing necropolitics through praxis. Drawing upon artistic outcomes of research funded by the Leverhulme Trust on borders, risk and belonging, and collaborative research funded by the ESRC/NCRM using participatory theatre and walking methods, the article addresses the questions posed by the special issue: how is statelessness experienced by women seeking asylum and mothers with no recourse to public funds? To what extent are their lived experiences marked by precarity, social and civil death? What does it mean to be a woman and a mother in these precarious times, ‘at the borders of humanity’? Where are the spaces for resistance and how might we as artists and researchers – across the arts, humanities and social sciences – contribute and activate?
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