Unanticipated Routes and Windows of Opportunity: Biographical Narratives of Migrant NGO Staff

This paper is based on research in Austria, the UK and the Netherlands into the trajectories and positionalities of staff of NGOs supporting migrants, who share their migration background with their ‘clients’. Many of these staff members have experienced a shift from being a client of these NGOs themselves, to becoming a provider of services and advice. Based on their biographical narratives which demonstrate a break between their previous work experience and qualifications, I suggest that their recruitment should be understood both in the context of a diversity management discourse that values their ‘difference’ as a skill, and in relation to labour market discrimination that closes off other avenues of employment.

I argue that their biographies reveal that their social mobility should be conceptualised as contextual and relational, since different points of reference, such as their status in their country of origin, their initial position upon arrival, and the different communities in which they are embedded, could render them simultaneously as socially mobile and immobile. Furthermore, this paper proposes to read their social mobility with an intersectional approach that complicates transnationality with an analysis of situated class as well as gender positions and relations. Finally, I will draw on their biographical narratives to address the paradoxical ways in which a diversity management logic that recognises their ‘difference’ as a resource is both a stimulus for their social mobility, and simultaneously a barrier for continued upward mobility, locking them into their position as ‘migrant Other’.