This paper explores the 'momentous mobility' that lays enmeshed in transcontinental migration. It documents how re-emplacement across differently structured privilege regimes affects and partly ...reconfigures the habitus of those on-the-move. It looks at the impact that a notoriously segregated city like Dubai has on a group of skilled Western laborers who constitute a minority in their EU country of origin, namely second-generation European Maghrebis from Belgium and the Netherlands. In documenting their newfound class sensibilities in the UAE, it develops the 'traveling habitus', a conceptual tool which helps capture the interplay between kinetic human mobility and implicit class mobility. This transitive analytic shows that class may function as an 'arrival infrastructure' in its own right, capable of remolding migrants' habitual character traits, bodily stylings, and sense of self-worth by means of its gravitational force and timely logic. This contribution thus foregrounds the oft ignored fact that migrants traverse not only geographical places and ethno-religious boundaries, but equally engage in 'class journeys' in between class locations. In the UAE, this class progression was further characterized and complicated by a perceived sense of 'racial mobility'.
This paper discusses the fraught status paradoxes and settlement impediments of European migrants in Asian cities like Tokyo, Singapore, and Dubai. Global European emigration is predominantly ...imagined as professional 'expatriation', framed as temporary if not steeped in linear career pathways of manifest privilege. The implied bifurcation between voluntary European mobilities and economic migrations from the Global South is complicated here by foregrounding the existential aspirations of middling European emigrants who are anxious about their future class position in Europe and therefore resettle along a wider trans-Asian economic corridor. While this European mobile middle retains global advantages in terms of transnational circulation and entry by virtue of their European citizenship capital, they face under-documented legal hurdles and social precarities in their quest for overseas permanence. We conceptualise this transcontinental process, marked by a complex set of mobility ambivalences over time, as 'migratory class-making', the distinctive aspirations of which elucidate that structural socioeconomic incentives are equally bound up with contemporary forms of European migration. Enmeshed in this global process of migratory class-making lays a European predicament that speaks of blighted existential hopes about middle-class stability imagined to be the ideal result of multi-year investments in class-making across Europe and Asia.
This article explores the emigration of tertiary-educated EU citizens with North African heritage to Dubai. Longitudinal ethnographic data suggests that leaving Europe was a mobility strategy for ...dealing with a sense of 'racial stuckedness' at home, a status concern undergirding their stagnant socio-economic position. By 'transnationalizing' Bourdieu's seminal conceptual tool kit of the 'forms of capital', it contrasts the conversion yields of timely achieved educational credentials, marked by racial friction at home but significantly higher returns after transgressing into more favorable status zones overseas. This differently structured outcome suggests the analytical productivity of an altogether distinct value form, 'racial capital.'
This article addresses conceptual issues around contemporary forms of out-of-Europe migrations of various European publics. In particular, we ask how such moves contribute to both the decentring of ...Europe in migration debates, and to the 'de-migranticization' (Dahinden,
2016
) of the social scientific study of migration. This article also serves as the introduction to this special issue entitled "Leaving Europe: Alternative routes of up/outward mobility" that aims to document ethnographically new forms of European emigration and shed light on an imaginary of Europe which is not conceived as a place of prosperity and success but rather as a locus of disempowerment.
This article contrasts historical and contemporary discourses and visualizations of the notions of Homeland, the Other and the Self that have been applied in the Zionist/Israeli project to colonize ...Palestine and displace its indigenous inhabitants. It actively connects theories of visual sociology and cultural studies (postmodern critical theory) with (1) various Israeli and Palestinian political discourses of Belonging (nationhood) while also (2) providing the reader with clear-cut, material examples of both exclusivist Zionist technologies of power and subaltern Palestinian techniques of counter-discourse, ultimately retracing historical continuity and unveiling resonant dialectics of modern nationalist doctrine across the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries throughout both Europe and the Middle East. Critically tracing and decoding the altering semiotic identity of a set of politicized posters highlights the key importance and the ongoing use of abstract power (discourse) within Israeli strategies of occupation and siege while simultaneously disclosing innovative Palestinian forms of visual resistance that advocate 'existence' in an asymmetric configuration of 'conflict'. In order to interpret the selected visuals fully, one needs foremost to be acquainted with the interwoven 'migration' of populations, ideas, and praxes through both time and space.
This special issue tries to map, describe, and understand the aspirations and strategies, the hopes and anxieties of people leaving behind Europe in order to settle, work, and live in other parts of ...the world – while some do not consider a future return to Europe as a desired option. Such out-of-Europe resoluteness appears to be in complex ways related to a sense of crisis which the people under consideration experience and seek to defy.
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