'Living the Dream' Cosmopolitan Post-Austerity Portuguese Migrants in London and the Desire for a Good Life

Abstract

This thesis asks how highly educated Portuguese migrants in London experience and embody the desire to live a 'good life'. In answering this question, I also explore the effect this desire has on the way my research participants relate to others in the context of social and economic changes wrought by the 2008 financial crisis and the years leading up to it. Drawing on nearly three years of anthropological fieldwork in London and Portugal, the conceptual basis of my thesis rests on a differentiation outlined by my research participants between 'old' (working class) and 'new' (cosmopolitan) Portuguese migrants. I conceptualise this conflict as a contradiction in orientations, which I address via a tri-faceted theoretical framework that interweaves theories of cosmopolitanism, temporality and 'good life'. In defining cosmopolitanism as an emerging sense of global commonality, underscored by inherent conflict (Vertovec and Cohen 2002), my analysis asks how migrant cosmopolitan identities are lived and understood within the desire for freedom/a 'good life', and ongoing relationships with kin and wider social and laboral networks. The temporal aspect of my analysis is inspired by a Deleuzian understanding of desire as a human condition, which links the individual and the collective, through what Deleuze and Guatarri (2003) refer to as 'assemblages'-the meeting of bodies, things and ideas across time and space. By taking into account an emerging set of local and global conditions as a backdrop to the transformative potential of migration (conceived as an ongoing process of becoming), I ask how my research participants' experiences of the world are lived and felt in temporal and spatial terms. Building on the anthropology of Self and personhood in the context of crisis in Southern Europe, my research offers a unique contribution-focusing on a 'Southern' problem which is felt and transformed in the 'Northern' context in which it takes place. I confirm that the work presented in this thesis is my own, unless otherwise stated.