Social and Spatial Mobility: New Entanglements of Class and Migration

Whether navigating resurgent authoritarianisms or other political, economic and religious change, migration is often a driver of new social formations and social movements. This joint session brings migration studies into dialogue with the sociology of class and social stratification to interrogate how these two fields inform our understanding of global changes. Social class is a lens underemphasised in the sociology of migration over recent decades, despite earlier emphasis on its influence on the political economy of migration. Social mobility aspirations have traditionally been a motivating factor for migrants, yet outcomes are mixed and can involve downwards as well as upwards mobility. Under contemporary migration policies that privilege the movement of those with credentialled skills or economic resources, class is a key site of in/exclusion and border filtering. The freedom to move is an increasingly significant cause of stratification, intersecting with populist and authoritarian political changes worldwide. These patterns compound individual and intergenerational life chances, challenging our understandings of how and why people move.

Papers in this panel session present cases from diverse global contexts that explore these intersections to ask how new configurations and entanglements resulting from migration extend class theories typically developed with reference to nationally-bounded societies and economies? Similarly, we ask whether narratives of spatial mobility as a mechanism of social mobility still constitute compelling motivations for migrants? And finally, how are forms of class consciousness or mobilisation encountered at places of departure, destination and transit, and how do they relate to other religious, economic or political changes?