Mobilities, locality and place-making: understanding categories of (non-)membership in a peripheral valley

Abstract

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.

Disentangling entangled mobilities: reflections on forms of knowledge production within migration studies

“…A study conducted by Charmillot and Dahinden (2021) may illustrate this point. They applied a mobility lens to investigate the ways in which membership is organised in a peripheral(ised) Swiss valley.…”

Precarious Emplacement in Croatia: Conceptualising More-Than-Transient Migration on the Balkan Route

“…Unable to leave the place of transit and pursue these aspirations, their destinies become entangled with new and unexpected places as they build new relations with the inhabitants of transit areas. A group of scholars has employed the concept of "entangled im/mobilities" to demonstrate how mobilities of various types and paces are entangled, and how the place of arrival is intertwined with movement (Çaglar and Glick Schiller, 2018;Menet, 2020;Charmillot and Dahinden, 2021). The next section will further explore this intersection between migration and the place of transit as it discusses the concept of migrant emplacement.…”

Local Migrant Integration Policies and Their Structural Mechanisms

“…The books's focus on the various local integration policies and practices in the four selected countries necessitates a number of simplifications. These stem, for example, from the fact that the monograph works with methodological nationalism and the logic of nation states (Wimmer and Glick Schiller 2002) and does not sufficiently emphasise the processes of inclusion and exclusion that can affect other key variables, such as transnational ties (see Charmillot and Dahinden 2022). Similarly, the authors are aware of the fact that, to achieve successful coexistence of newly arrived migrants and previously settled populations, there is much more at stake than can be captured in national descriptions of local policy settings.…”