ABSTRACT
This chapter delves into the strategies through which upwardly mobile young adults of North African immigrant backgrounds find a sense of place in their elite higher education institutions. Unlike the predictions of the assimilationist thesis, it suggests that adapting to their new educational places has in part been achieved through the deployment of ‘minority cultures of mobility’. Namely, through active participation in networks made up of students with similar educational trajectories and class and ethno-racial backgrounds, the respondents have alleviated their feelings of isolation and better coped with experiences of everyday racism. Their school-based associative engagement has further commonly displayed, at times reinvented, a sense of identification with their minority backgrounds along with membership in their institutions. Through these specific informal and formal arrangements, a straight-line process of assimilation, commonly viewed as the corollary of the mobility experience, has been resisted. This chapter further highlights trajectory-specific differences along with disparities rooted in the respondents’ distinctive classed and raced subjectivities.
