Mobility: A Practice or a Capital?

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.

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Mobility: A Practice or a Capital?

Cited by 2 publications

References 75 publications

Forced displacement and subsequent generations’ migration intentions: intergenerational transmission of family migration capital

Forced displacement and subsequent generations’ migration intentions: intergenerational transmission of family migration capital

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

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