This article employs a mobility lens to investigate the ways in which membership is organised in a peripheral(ised) place. We show that adopting such a lens makes it possible to tackle important pitfalls in migration studies -an urban and sedentary bias and national-and ethnicity-based epistemologies. By including different types of transnational, national and local mobilities and applying a unit of analysis that comprises all people who live in or pass through the place under study -rather than only a particular ethnic or national group -we are able to identify the processes in which (im)mobilities are entangled with each other and their relationship with local processes of community formation. Based on ethnographic research in a Swiss valley, our study depicts a scheme of ordering (non-)membership that we refer to as the imagined community of fate of the Valley-ers. The latter can be understood as 'emplaced peripheralisation' that is the outcome of a dynamic and nested form of boundary work in which the most important categories and markers are socio-economic -rather than nation-and ethnicity-based. Our results demonstrate the importance of de-centring the role of migration and the city when it comes to understanding the social organisation of difference at particular places.
Based on an ethnographic case study in a Swiss valley on the border with France, this paper sheds light on the emergence of a regime of (im)moral mobilities. It investigates how and why the presence of a specific border in a peripheralized regionin this case a national border separating spheres of income inequalityinforms and results in dynamics of morally contested mobilities. The analysis shows how some cross-border mobilities, while being legal (such as living in Switzerland and shopping in France or living in France and working in Switzerland), are negotiated by borderlanders, who perceive them as damaging to the economic and social wellbeing of the valley. It focuses on everyday practices and discourses to illuminate the informal and mundane (re)production of borders and boundaries. The deployment of the regime of (im)moral mobilitiesand all the discourses and practices it comprisesproduces immoralized individuals who are stigmatized, as well as moralized persons who feel they belong to a collective.
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