"Where are you from?" Race, class and situational migratisation

Mikoshiba, Sayaka and Benson, Michaela and Sirriyeh, Ala (2025) "Where are you from?" Race, class and situational migratisation. PhD thesis, Lancaster University.

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Abstract

This study investigates the experiences of racially minoritised adults with internationally mobile upbringings due to their parents’ work, with a particular focus on their experiences of the question, “Where are you from?”. Based on inductive analysis of 24 biographical narrative interviews incorporating music elicitation and conducted longitudinally with eight, racially minoritised and ethnically diverse individuals over an 11-month period, this study identifies “Where are you from?” as an instance of migratisation, or the construction of migrant subjects who are framed as out of place and belonging elsewhere. The study reveals that processes of migratisation are both racialised and classed, underwritten by contestations of the legitimacy of cultural capitals in their embodiment. Race and class operate intersectionally in mediating the degrees to which cultural capitals embodied by racially minoritised subjects are recognised as symbolic capital. Furthermore, by examining how participants’ cultural capitals are evaluated differently in different contexts globally, thus triggering migratisation in context-specific ways, this study argues that migratisation is situational. It proposes the concept of situational migratisation, or the context-dependent ways in which race and class intersect in contestations of the legitimacy of cultural capitals in their embodiments, triggering migratisation, or the construction of the capitals’ owners as migrant figures belonging elsewhere. Making visible the experiences of a population largely elided in studies on privilege in migration, this study contributes to a theorisation of privilege in migration as relational, situational and contingent.