396
Qualitative Research on Social Inequality in Societies Shaped By Migration: Ethnography and Biography As Multiperspective Approaches
Abstract Submissions Closed
RC31 Sociology of Migration (host committee)
Language: English
Session Type: Oral
Migratory movements across borders are constitutive of globalized societies. Territorial borders are crossed, material borders drawn up, and symbolic borders of belonging formed. These symbolic processes are accompanied by situative attributions and experiences of marginalization that can be read as field-specific practices of differentiation. A focus on these practices and experiences can offer insights into the production of social inequalities. In doing so, questions concerning possibilities and forms of transnational ways of life, vulnerability and the capability to act, belonging and marginalization, insecurities and restrictions regarding access to education and the labor market that are connected to an (unregulated) residence status become important.
Hereby, qualitative inequality research is confronted with the challenge to reconstruct manifest inequality categories in their meaning for practices of doing difference and experiences of marginalization in relation to latent structures of social inequality. This challenge can be faced by a combination of different data. Using an ethnographical approach, situative practices of differentiation can be analyzed as situated in social inequality structures. Using methods of biography research, narrations can be analyzed regarding the biographical development, experiences of inequality and the interplay of social categories of difference, like forms of multiple belonging. But how can these different approaches and perspectives be related to one another systematically in order to reconstruct relations of inequality appropriately?
We invite contributions that focus on the production and the transformation of social inequalities by reconstructing practices of doing difference and forms of multiple belonging in a combination of ethnographical-biographical perspectives.