RADU CINPOES, Kingston University, London

How do people decide to migrate? How do migrants situate themselves reflectively in their new social settings, and how does this impact on their social mobility? There is much disagreement in the field about the determinants and consequences of migration on the individuals involved in the process. Various explanations have been proposed, ranging from macro-level accounts focusing on migrant gravitation from low-income countries to high-income countries, to micro-level approaches focusing on individual decisions, to network theory that accounts for social capital in maximising benefits, while reducing the negative effects of migration. The paper draws substantially on Margaret Archer’s work concerning human subjectivity, and makes three broad suggestions: that the process of migration needs to be re-evaluated so that it would account for an integrative, relational model, which accounts for human subjectivity; that migration is the result of the agents’ reflexive mediation of their own position in relation to structural conditionings; and that these dynamics impact on social mobility.

Discutants / Lucia Quaquarelli, Jean-Robert Raviot