Becoming a migrant in europe: accounts of motive, meaning and identity formation
- Autores: Maricia Fischer Souan
- Directores de la Tesis: Juan Díez Medrano (dir. tes.), Francisco Javier García de Polavieja Perera (codir. tes.)
- Lectura: En la Universidad Carlos III de Madrid ( España ) en 2020
- Idioma: español
- Tribunal Calificador de la Tesis: Yasemin Soysal (presid.), Ettore Recchi (secret.), Adrian Favell (voc.)
- Programa de doctorado: Programa de Doctorado en Ciencias Sociales / Social Sciences por la Universidad Carlos III de Madrid
- Materias:
- Enlaces
- Tesis en acceso abierto en: e-Archivo
- Resumen
The dissertation casts light on migrant identities and subjectivities from multiple perspectives (both European and non-European migrants) and at different junctures of the migration process. It approaches several key moments and dimensions of migration experiences that shape the processes of becoming a migrant. Notably, how the decision to move is recounted in motive accounts of migration and their connection to ‘public narratives’ on emigration in the Spanish context of EU mobility during the Great Recession (Study 1); non-EU migrants’ sense of becoming ‘othered’ by mainstream Europeans and how this impacts their social identity and self-understanding (Study 2); and how creative interpretations of spatial categories relevant to the migratory experience shape belonging across multiple contexts (Study 3). Each study puts emphasis on migrants’ agency in interpreting their own migration behaviour and experience and in extracting meaning from their social position - whether as emigrants vis-à-vis the sending society, or as ‘strangers’ in relation to the receiving society.
The thesis relies on individual migration narratives as sources of inquiry into evolving self-understandings. The three studies draw on multi-sited fieldwork I conducted between 2014 and 2017, which yielded 150 in-depth interviews concerning several aspects of migratory experiences and aspirations in relation to both sending and receiving societies. Each study focuses on a specific moment or dimension of the construction of the migrant-self. It contributes to cultural approaches in migration studies that treat migration as a major life-event and cultural phenomenon and that challenge rigid distinctions between economic vs. non-economic migrants. It also attempts to ‘go beyond the ethnic lens’ by focusing not only on migrants’ experiences of racism and marginalization but also on individual understandings of and strategies of boundary-making (Study 2). Finally, it argues that migration experiences can alter one’s understanding of and relationship to space to the extent that feelings of belonging can arise not only from attachments to distinct places related to the country of origin and residence, but also from blurring the boundaries between disparate places and spatial scales (Study 3).
Specific migration-related experiences, from accounting for the decision to leave one’s place of origin, to coming to terms with one’s status as ‘other’ and adjusting one’s spatial imaginary and attachments to one’s new environment, can be understood in the pragmatist sociological tradition as a series of ‘problem-situations’ that the migrant actor endeavours to ‘solve’. A consistent theme across each study is the ‘problematization’ of the migrant’s being or mobility behaviour, whether from his or her own perspective or public and external perspectives (e.g. how emigration is seen by sending countries or how immigrants are seen in receiving societies). However, each essay suggests that the migrant’s experience cannot be reduced to this moment of ‘problematization’. In an attempt to construct or to reconstruct meaning and coherence in the individual biography, migrant-actors develop tools, drawing from both external (social) categorisation and experience, on the one hand, and self-understandings and individual orientations, on the other, that reduce the ‘distance’ (physical and symbolic) between points A and point B in the migration trajectory. Thus, this dissertation finds that the process of becoming a migrant does not begin and end with spatial mobility. Rather, at various stages, it engages the individual in a struggle across personal rupture and continuity.
The two research populations – Spanish EU movers in Berlin and London, on the one hand, and the three groups of postcolonial migrants, principally Algerians, Ecuadorians, and Indians in Paris, London and Madrid, on the other – offer distinct vantage points from which to consider topics of contemporary migration in the EU. Spaniards, as European citizens, face fewer obstacles in their mobility and settlement in EU contexts than the other research population that I have studied. Yet, public representations of Spanish emigration in Spain framed the phenomenon of rising emigration during the economic crisis in terms of a highly constrained situation - the inability of the Spanish government and institutions to retain Spanish youth (and as a collective tragedy) rather than in terms of Spaniards’ rights to live and work in another EU state. As I point out in Study 1, the Spanish emigrants I interviewed would frequently juxtapose this public narrative with their personal migration narratives, regardless of whether they identified with it. Thus, the migration narratives of many Spanish crisis-era migrants were infused with a high degree of problematization, especially where their motive accounts are concerned. In this sense, many of my Spanish respondents had internalized a certain dominant ‘gaze’ (a concept I explicitly address in Study 2, albeit from a different perspective), which required them to justify their migration decision in relation to this public understanding.
The ‘gaze’ that is the subject of Study 2 concerns that of the mainstream (non-migrant) European populations that the three groups of postcolonial migrants feel subject to in France, the UK and Spain. This study, more explicitly than Study 1, also argues that an external gaze, both literal and symbolic in this case, shapes a migrant’s self-understanding and social identity formation. Study 2 is focused on perceptions of cultural distance, and most specifically, on how minorities perceive the construction of distance around them by mainstream members. Migrants’ negotiation of social identity does not end with the moment of ‘problematization’, however. It unfolds through a dynamic relationship between external categorisation and internal self-understanding that allows one to draw meaning from the perception of otherness.
In Study 3, the rupture-continuity dialectic is explored as constitutive of processes of migrant subjectivity. It explicitly addresses the juxtaposition of primary and secondary socialisation (socialisation at point A and point B) as a source of personal rupture for the migrant and as creating the conditions for problematization of belonging. One is confronted with a new ‘freedom’ in choosing where to belong as a result of experiences in multiple places related to the migration experience. As a result, migrants can develop place affiliations that reflect the new cultural and geographic situation, but that can also be integrated into the individual biography in a way that makes sense in terms of previous, current or aspired affiliations.
