See Ben Rogaly's most recent Society & Space contributions: Disrupting migration stories: reading life histories through the lens of mobility and fixity

One way of countering anti-immigrant sentiment and widespread demonization of migrants of the kind heard in the recent UK general election campaign is to disrupt the terms of the debate. Anti-migrant discourse relies on an established notion of who is a migrant and who is not. This is a notion based not on the self-identification of the individuals concerned but on the preconceptions and/or political interests of the commentator. To point this out is not simply to call for academic deconstruction of taken-for-granted ideas. After all ‘migrant’ can be a useful category to organize resistance around, and some people see migrancy as part of their personhood. Rather, it can contribute to breaking the tendency of powerful people to separate others into fixed categories such as ‘migrant’ and ‘local’ in order to foster division and (conveniently) to keep the spotlight off themselves.

This post is written to accompany a new Society and Space article, ‘Disrupting migration stories: reading life histories through the lens of mobility and fixity‘, that takes a fresh look at how concepts from mobility studies, together with a biographical oral history approach, can productively query the way migration is understood, while keeping the connections between structural inequalities and mobility/fixity fully in view. The ‘mobilities paradigm’, like translocalism, offers language that moves away from the automatic association of the word ‘migration’ with its qualifier ‘international’. It allows within nation-state migration to be taken as seriously as border-crossing moves. But it can do much more. Critical mobilities thinking insists on holding together both mobility and fixity in any analysis, while revealing inequalities in who has the choice over whether to move or stay where they are, and who must leave or cannot move.

Critical mobility studies have displaced an earlier manifestation of the mobilities paradigm that was seen as over-celebratory of spatial moves. They also lend both nuance and theoretical heft to geographical studies of migration. Combined with biographical oral history they can go further still. The three men whose life stories are extracted from in the article have south Asian heritage, and all migrated to Britain as minors in the 1950s or 1960s. Superficially they have much in common, having begun their lives in the UK in rural areas or small towns rather than large cities, and worked at least for a period in factories. Yet they also exemplify diversity.

Reflecting on all three life stories together continues a long-established scholarly tradition of problematizing the category Asian/ south Asian in Britain as well as the figure of the ‘Asian factory worker’. The men have followed distinct employment trajectories and their stories are intertwined with contrasting histories of family relations. Pakzaad’s life story links past immobility to current mobility. He remembered feeling stuck and miserable living with relatives in the small town of Bedford for some of his teenage years. Yet his story also shows how being in that home meant living with a native English speaker who provided him with the linguistic resources for later moves to sixth form and eventually university education.

Amin’s multiple occupations as a self-defined ‘wheeler and dealer’ involved  fixity in the small city of Peterborough due to his need to play a full role in his daughters’ upbringing. Yet he was mobile over the same period, as a commuter to a Cambridge factory, and as a traveling jewelry and garment trader. The methodological combination of mobility studies and biographical oral history thus also provides the tools to analyze such simultaneity of movement and stasis.

The emotional narrating of a move of just 23 kilometres (14 miles) from rural March in Cambridgeshire to Peterborough by the third man, Manak, revealed a pain that had still not dissipated. This was caused by the move having been forced upon him by his father, bringing what Manak felt to be the premature ending of his teenage desire to join the Royal Air Force (RAF) after a successful run in the cadets. There was no RAF cadet force in the family’s new home city. Manak remembered the move as much more traumatic than his longer distance international migration from India to England.

All three men spoke about encounters with racism at various points. Whether this took the form of obstacles to promotion or punitive treatment by a teacher, it contributed to shaping, though never fully determined, the mens’ stories of mobility and immobility, as well as their class status. The biographical oral history approach avoids boxing people into class categories: class remains mutable even in the face of massive structural inequality. Overall, the combination of a historical perspective, attentiveness to place, and the agility of the concepts of mobilities and fixity reveal much about the men’s class status over time. The approach is also revealing of the their subjective experiences of class, and how these were gendered, racialised, and simultaneously location-specific and stretched across space. In the context of the men’s whole lives, international migration at one point, and factory work for a number of years at another, were put into perspective as components of stories that contained diverse, often simultaneously experienced, forms of spatial mobility and fixity.

Rather than celebrating spatial mobility, mobilities and fixity can be seen through these stories as integral to understanding both representations and embodied experiences of class, ‘race’ and gender and the intersections between them. They disrupt standard tropes of migration and push us towards an understanding both of a diversity that defies categorization, and of common experiences of living in times and places of rampant inequality