Evaluating the process of cross‐European migration: Beyond cultural capital

Abstract

The paper explores different ways of thinking about evaluating cultural resources in East–West migration in Europe and broader international migration. It goes beyond the dominant Bourdieusian approaches used to evaluate migration in terms of cultural capital, which tend to measure migrants’ cultural competencies as calculable entities and overlook emergent regimes of value often leading to the exclusion of itinerant people. The paper draws on the ideas of Gilles Deleuze and Friedrich Nietzsche to reformulate value in relation to transnational cultural resources, re‐think distance in negotiation of cultural preferences, and highlight spatio‐temporal uncertainty of evaluation. It unsettles the attempts to represent cultural resources of migrants solely in relation to the external system of values, determined in relation to Bourdieu's habitus. It argues that in the process of migration habitus mediates what things are valued, converted, and exchanged in different contexts, but obscures emergent, affective practices and attitudes. To attend to these mobile practices, the paper explores evaluations as “ways of being” and highlights active or becoming evaluation that expresses the migrants’ relational movement with the world. Using a range of qualitative examples from a long‐term study of Eastern European migration to Scotland, it questions the placement of evaluation in relation to a region and specific type of migration. The paper challenges the existence of a self‐defining migrant subject making evaluations and highlights the emergence of hybrid arrangements of people, memories, and things in migration. It considers how such migration “assemblages” redefine “minor” in existing systems of cultural validation and expand cultural con/dis‐junctions. It highlights temporal and spatial uncertainty of evaluation and expresses multiple evaluating claims in migration that are not teleological or subordinated to consciousness. It concludes with conceptual observations about the use of “nomadic” thinking, the language of multiplicity, non‐representation, and immanent production of difference in migration research.