Publications

People’s movements and their immobilities are structured by and structure specific livelihood trajectories and the places at the crossroads. This chapter connects livelihood studies to recent geographical research and draws on Bourdieu’s Theory of Practice as conceptual frame analysing the relations between (im)mobility, translocality and place-making in three steps. First, I argue that migrants and refugees are permanently positioning themselves in translocal social fields and that their trajectories are often marked by conflicts and fragmentations. The ‘turbulent’ journeys of Sub-Saharan migrants to Europe show that spatial and social trajectories are neither direct nor uni-linear, particularly when people are confronted with restrictive migration regimes and militarised borders. Second, mobility can contribute to the livelihood security of, then, translocal households. Other examples from the European border space and from Bangladesh do, however, indicate that translocal social networks can become a burden or cause new vulnerability. Third, any analysis of translocal livelihood trajectories is incomplete when we fail to consider the structure of the places that serve as ‘crossroads of migration’. Transient places are permanently transformed through different rhythms and forms of mobility, i.e. flows of people, capital, goods and ideas. While such transformations open up further options for translocal livelihoods, they pose challenges to established structures of territorial regulation and evoke new contestations over space.

Please find the book chapter here.