ABSTRACT
Migration is increasingly a life project of relatively privileged subjects, particularly the burgeoning global middle classes. Yet, the relationship between social and spatial mobility remains, in practice, complex and unevenly experienced. In this chapter, we thus seek to understand how a renewed conceptualisation of middling migration can be an entry point to also renewing understandings of the contemporary dynamics of class, privilege and migration. We see middling migration as a space of relational and dynamic modes of privilege and a space of ‘in-betweenness’ and transition, rather than a static social or economic status. Drawing throughout the chapter on a range of extant literature, we explore the connections between class, privilege and mobility (both spatial and social) within the emerging migration conditions of the 21st century. In doing so, we elucidate three central challenges to future research. First, we argue for rethinking middling migration through the lens of privilege in ways that understand how middle-class cultures and resources shape migrants’ privilege; how privilege is also produced by intersections with other modes of migrant identity; and how privilege is unfixed, fragile, contingent. Second, we argue for close attention to theorisations of race and racialisation in migration that can account for how racialisation impacts migrants as they move between social locations, social milieus, and economic circumstances over time. Third, we argue for a recentring of the biographical temporalities of life stage and life course into the study of middling migration, in order to highlight how privilege shifts across the life course and how moments of life transition condition the experience of being a migrant ‘of the middle’.
