Abstract
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.
Highlights
Migrants encounter various opportunities and obstacles in their strategies to convert and accumulate different kinds of capital across national borders
What is at stake in this article is the development of an analytic framework for understanding migration and capital formation as part of fast-paced national and transnational social change. We propose that such a spatio-temporal multi-level analysis can highlight migrants’ agency and strategies to mobilize resources as capitals; building new capitals in new places
While we present life stories of women migrants, we believe the analytical framework may be applicable to men
Summary
We propose that such a spatio-temporal multi-level analysis can highlight migrants’ agency and strategies to mobilize resources as capitals; building new capitals in new places. In advancing a multi-level analytical framework, we propose that research should look at the formation of migrants’ capitals through the micro-level of personal narratives, the meso-level of networks and the macro-level of structural factors, such as changing global, national and transnational socio-economic and political relations and conditions. By paying attention to all three levels simultaneously, as well as being sensitive to change over time, we argue, it is possible to understand the significance of broader structuring factors and migrants’ agential strategies This framework speaks to wider sociological interest in fragmentations, incongruities and breaks of cultural capital, in particular as expressed in the notion of ‘habitus clivé’ (Bourdieu, 2008). First we briefly discuss the methods we used and the individual research we drew on to write this article together
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