ABSTRACT
Another significant yet often under-studied dimension of the mobility/dwelling nexus is the interaction of migrant groups at the dwelling places. This chapter explores how the existence of ‘old diversity’ shapes the ways in which highly educated migrants from Turkey negotiate their daily experience. It argues that encounters between old and new diversities in the dwelling places take place against the backdrop of existing ‘ethnic hierarchies’ and the new urban phenomenon of super-diversity. In select interactions and moments, the country of origin and the religion associated with it nonetheless seem to remain the main markers of difference and identity, assigning fixity and enforcing emplacement in a demographic that considers itself highly mobile. Such practices of ‘forced emplacement’ expose the highly educated migrants to ramped-up discourses on Muslim ‘integration’ in Europe and also constrain their embedded sense of mobility. They mobilize other variables from the terrain of super-diversity, such as human capital and the level of education, as well as claims to a secular identity, in order to assert distinctness and difference. However, such claims also rely on invocations of the same hegemonic discourses that reproduce ‘ethnic hierarchies’ and stereotypes about established Turkish or other Muslim communities. Moreover, the chapter shows that both the communities in relation to which they draw boundaries and the assets through which they can substantiate their claims are locally and transnationally embedded.
