Migrant young people’s narratives of aspirations: the role of migrant positionality, habitus and capitals

Abstract

ABSTRACT Drawing on a qualitative study conducted in Greece, the paper examines migrant young peoples’ narratives of educational and occupational aspirations. The paper employs Bourdieu’s theoretical framework to conceptualise aspirations as a product of habitus encompassing embodied dispositions shaped in the course of individual and familial trajectories in transnational social fields. Narrative-discursive analysis of in-depth interviews unpacks the differing degree in which migrant people’s positionality and mobilisation of capitals mediate their aspirations, as the latter reflect their emerging transnational habitus and their pragmatic evaluations of their interlinked past, present and future.