Engendering transnational space: Migrant mothers as cultural currency speculators

Introduction

This article explores the role of gender in the formation of cultural capital in transnational contexts, focusing on how migrant mothers strategically deploy cultural resources from one national setting in another. Mothers play an important role in transmitting, maintaining or enhancing cultural capital from one generation to the next. In migration they are faced with the challenge of ensuring the cultural resources they transmit to their children are validated: a habitus ‘infused with an ethnic group’s culture may provide an individual with cultural capital that counts within the ethnic group but means very little outside it’ (Hall, 1992: 271). Mothers’ agency can bridge this gap between the differential value attributed to cultural resources in different national settings. Drawing on a study of European migrant mothers in London, the article opens up new areas of enquiry for migration and gender studies, and contributes to theorizing cultural capital on the transnational level. Bourdieusian notions of cultural capital are developed with reference to nationally bounded cultural fields. I demonstrate how some mothers engage in transnational cultural currency speculation and argue that they engender transnational social spaces.

The article shows how class and ethnically privileged migrant mothers can strategically deploy their transnational cultural resources to compensate for shortcomings of economic capital and of local cultural and social capital. I further suggest that these transnational cultural resources can also be mobilized to accrue added value to their children’s education. Mothers can make strategic use of the differential valuation of cultural resources in nationally bounded settings, engaging in transnational currency speculation of cultural resources. As they convert educational investment in their children into credentials in the national setting where they expect the highest returns, they construct themselves as players in a transnational social space.

The first section introduces the empirical study, then I discuss how research on transnational migration has addressed cultural capital, particularly focusing on Bourdieusian approaches and the treatment of gender and migration. Drawing on a case study from a research project on European mothers in London, I explore migrant mothers as engendering emergent transnational spaces through their speculation in cultural capital.

The study: European mothers in London

Until the accession of new EU member states in 2004, migrants from other European countries to London have received relatively little attention, although they constitute a sizeable group (but see e.g. Favell, 2008; White, 1998). In 2009, 669,000 EU citizens were resident in London, making up 8.7% of the city’s population (GLA, 2010: 3). More than half of children born in 2008 in London were born to migrant mothers (4Children, 2011: 2). While London is certainly specific in its ethnic diversity, even in England and Wales, 7.3% of children born in 2010 had EU-born mothers (ONS, 2011). Thus, this group of children is numerically significant.

This article draws on a study of European migrant mothers in London. In spring 2011 I conducted in-depth interviews with 30 mothers of school-aged children from a range of European Union member states, comprising Northern, Southern and Eastern European countries, to cover different migration experiences and a range of constructions of cultural and social difference. Interviewees were recruited through personal contacts at schools, Saturday schools, nurseries, mothers’ bookgroups and play groups. I asked potential interview partners directly or through the help of sponsors to participate. Ahead of the interview I emailed an information sheet introducing the research question and issues of research ethics. I had a very positive response, most mothers I approached were happy to participate, despite the fact that many suffered from a lack of time. This meant that some interviews had to be scheduled weeks in advance, some took place early on Sunday mornings, when family members were still resting, some late on a weekday evening, when children were already sleeping. The interviews were conducted in English, audio-recorded and fully transcribed. The semi-structured interviews covered migration trajectories, experiences of mothering and questions of participation and belonging, as I was interested in how migrant mothers position themselves and their children vis-a-vis British and European citizenship. The participants had been living in London between three and 25 years.

While research on migrant families tends to focus on low paid, ethnicized non-European migrants this study contributes a different perspective: all the women were white, European and heterosexual, most identified as middle class. During fieldwork the significance of issues of cultural capital emerged, since many interviewees were professionally engaged or volunteered in the culture producing sector, e.g. as teachers, lecturers, in publishing, as artists, designers. In addition many were ‘voracious’ cultural participants, frequently participating in a wide range of out-of-home activities, often in high cultural forms (Katz-Gerro and Sullivan, 2010). Frequently, this also included their children.

The interviewees were able to benefit from intra-European mobility and thus did not encounter difficulties in terms of migration regulations or in the validation of their qualifications, they saw migration as offering new professional, personal and cultural opportunities (cf. Favell, 2008). Moreover, they were able to draw on the ‘cultural capital of whiteness’ (Lareau and Horvat, 1999) that partly gave them access to privileged social positions and networks. Yet, their migration trajectory meant that in some instances and fields they lacked local capital and what Hage (1998: 57) calls ‘national capital’, that is particular cultural and physical resources, which are politically recognized as legitimizing a person’s claim to national belonging. Studying the experiences of privileged migrants matters, because it elucidates and can deconstruct the processes of producing and validating particular forms of cultural capital, challenging the normalization of privilege as merely based on competences.

Enhancing our understanding of how middle-class, ethnically privileged migrants experience cultural difference can help to disaggregate the interrelation of national cultural capital and racism. This study shows the contradictions between the progressive potential of destabilizing the privileges of nationally bounded cultural capital, on one hand, and the enhancement of ethnic and class privileges by reinscribing them on a European transnational level on the other.

Transnational migration and cultural capital

In their influential proposition for a transnational analytic frame, Glick Schiller et al. (1992) make a case for researching migrants as participants in two societies, within a globalizing system, focusing on migrants’ social relationships and positionings as ‘fluid and dynamic’ (1992: 8). They argue that migrants use these new transnational spaces by translating ‘the economic and social position gained in one political setting into political, social and economic capital in another’ (1992: 12). Glick Schiller et al. caution against cultural reductionism as cultural capital is always negotiated in hegemonic struggles. In a system of nation-states, transnational forms of culture always risk being appropriated into nationalized versions. Building on this framework I outline the role of gender, and mothering in particular, in engendering transnational social fields.

Not all theories of transnationalism pay enough attention to the contested and dynamic character of cultural capital, instead they reify ethnicity as the determining basis for social solidarity. Intra-ethnic divisions of gender, generation, class and others are often glossed over in accounts of transnational cultural capital, although access to the resources of ethnic groups is internally stratified (cf. Anthias, 2007). While some theorists recognize the central role of gender in producing social and cultural capital, they do not always pay adequate attention to the unequal access of gendered actors to these resources. Faist’s (1998) proposition that migrants make use of transnational networks of reciprocity and patterns of social exchange puts particular emphasis on kinship and family as resources that can be mobilized for economic benefit. Marriage strategies and the unpaid labour of women in family businesses are examples for strengthening intra-ethnic solidarity and expanding the social networks of migrant groups. In a similar vein Nee and Sanders (2001) suggest that women’s greater involvement in social networks creates ‘human cultural capital’ for the whole family. While these approaches treat gender differentiation as productive of collective resources, they do not explore the impact of gendered power relations on who can access and use such collective ethnic resources.

Tina: Playing the national educational field with transnational cultural resources

Tina is a German language teacher in a London secondary school. She is in her mid to late forties. She met her boyfriend on holiday and after graduating from high school migrated from Germany to England to join him. Subsequently they got married, her husband is a British mixed race professional. ¹ Due to his work they spent a couple of years in the 1980s in the US and in the 1990s in the Caribbean. They have three sons aged 21, 18 and 15: the oldest studies in a different English city, the younger two live at home and attend school. Tina is very committed to her paid job, where she is currently training for a more senior position, thus actively working on her institutionalized cultural capital. She is also investing in her embodied cultural capital as a ‘voracious’ (Katz-Gerro and Sullivan, 2010) cultural participant: she sings in three choirs and a band, regularly attends arts and musical events by German artists. She views this as following her personal interests, while also supporting her work. While she feels her children are ‘at home’ with their cultural background as British and Caribbean, as well as German, she has focused on teaching them German and helping them to access German cultural forms:

This view echoes a general consensus in my sample that multi-linguality is desirable. Interview partners supported this with a wide range of arguments referring to brain development, openness to cultural diversity, possible advantages in professional life. This builds on the ability of these European mothers to claim their languages of origin as useful and valuable cultural resources. It contrasts with the frequent devaluation of the home languages of racialized and ethnicized migrant mothers. Mothers take responsibility for enabling their children to access the language and cultural resources of their country of origin:

Furthermore mothers use these cultural resources to negotiate their own and their children’s social positioning, both within the mothers’ country of origin as well as the new country. This becomes particularly evident when exploring Tina’s story about choosing a secondary school for her children. Transition to secondary school is a key turning point in children’s educational history in the UK. While I cannot fully go into the complex sociological debates about this, I would like to briefly discuss why school choice is seen as so significant, particularly in large cities like London. In recent years politicians and public debate has increasingly emphasized that parents should be able to exercise choice about their children’s schooling. Yet, sociologists argue that the notion of ‘choice is a particularly middle-class way of operating in the world’ (Skeggs, cited in Byrne, 2009: 426). In this sense, the policy of granting parental schooling choice has been critiqued for allowing middle-class parents to build on and develop advantageous access to what are considered good schools (cf. Byrne, 2009). As there is fierce competition for ‘good schools’, parents develop strategies to access them. These strategies include moving house to be in the catchment area of the school, hiring private tutors, becoming actively involved in the life of religious institutions in order to access faith schools, etc. All of these strategies require an investment of considerable economic, time and social resources. When choosing a school for their children, middle-class parents rely on official reports, but perhaps more so, on their networks. While education is an important means to acquire qualifications, it is also important in acquiring class codes and cultural capital. ‘Much of the learning which the middle classes most care about is from fellow pupils as much as teachers. There is a desire to find a school filled with enough “people like us” who will teach children “how to be” ’ (Byrne, 2009: 427). These cultural codes are class specific, but at the same time racialized. Thus, quantitative research suggests that ethnic concentration in particular schools is a consequence of the school choices of parents (Byrne, 2009). Furthermore, schools have historically played an instrumental role in producing nationally codified knowledges and national identifications of students. In the same vein, of course, schools are also important sites for producing national dis-identifications and feelings of non-belonging for some students and their parents.

In line with other middle-class mothers in London, the mothers in my study understood the significance of school choice for their children as enabling them access to good education, but also to the particular status, cultural, classed and racialized codes attached to ‘good schools’. Yet, in many instances, they were torn between two impulses. On one hand, many invoked an egalitarian ethos, arguing that all schools should provide good education so that the choice of school would not become a matter of competition. This is a widespread discourse in British public debates on education, but what is specific to migrant mothers is that in their narratives they gave examples from the education systems of their country of origin to evidence their claim that such a widely available public provision of quality education is achievable and can lead to positive educational experiences. On the other hand, they felt it was their responsibility as mothers to do ‘what is best for the child’ and therefore participate in the competition for good secondary schools. However, many felt at a loss as to how to evaluate the options. Most of the women I spoke to were privileged migrants, identifying as white and middle class. Their migration trajectory as European citizens was largely one of accessing new opportunities, rather than a struggle of overcoming migration legislation or deskilling. Yet, despite this smooth migration experience, many felt that they did not have the cultural know-how necessary to successfully negotiate the British educational system to their children’s full advantage. Indeed, while these mothers’ geographical mobility is enabled by their European citizenship status and their cultural capital of whiteness allows them a privileged inclusion as migrants, their social trajectories of transnational mobility mean that there is a mismatch between their cultural capital and the institutional and informal validations since classed and racialized habitus is articulated in nationally specific ways. While positioned centrally in some regards, the migrant mothers lack ‘ontological complicity’ (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 2007: 127–128):

… when habitus encounters a social world of which it is the product, it is like a ‘fish in water’: it does not feel the weight of the water, and it takes the world about itself for granted … the world encompasses me (me comprend) but I comprehend it (je le comprends) precisely because it comprises me. It is because this world has produced me, because it has produced the categories of thought that I apply to it, that it appears to me as self-evident.

This shows how privileged positioning in the field is normalized as competence in navigating the field: ‘Those who are immediately adapted to the demands of the game … have an incarnate sense that arises from the synchrony between their habitus, its social trajectory and the institutional space’ (Puwar, 2004: 127). School choice requires ‘sufficient cultural capital – the information and specific competence – to decode the local market; to make judgements about the state of the market often five or even ten years into the future’ (Reay and Lucey, 2003: 126). Many mothers in this study felt like a fish out of water, unable to draw on these implicit, specifically British cultural knowledges on evaluating schools. This related to their insecurity on where and how classed and racialized boundaries are drawn, a highly effective though unspoken process. They lacked a ‘feel for the game’ (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 2007: 128) that enabled them to understand their own and others’ positioning in the field of education, as well as a grasp of the options of repositioning themselves and their children advantageously. This feel for the game is not based on conscious intentionality and discourse. It is acquired not through the explicit statement of rules but through familarization (Puwar, 2004: 125). One way in which the migrant mothers attempted to compensate for their lack was to reposition themselves with respect to national British educational capital and find ways of using their transnational positioning to validate the classed cultural resources gained in their country of origin as cultural capital in Britain.

Let us return to Tina’s story: while her children attended English primary schools and learned German through private tuition, she experienced a moment of crisis when her oldest son was in secondary school. The family had returned from a year’s stay in the Caribbean, where they had temporarily relocated due to her husband’s work, when her oldest son decided he did not want to go back to the comprehensive school he had previously attended in London:

After her oldest son’s positive experience at the German secondary school, Tina wanted to enrol her younger sons at this school, too. However, the middle son was initially not accepted because he failed the German language test. Subsequently, he enrolled at the local comprehensive, but then,

The same procedure was repeated for the youngest son, who was sent to stay for six months with the grandparents to improve his German. He was subsequently admitted to the German School in London.

However, despite these positive aspects of her sons’ attending the German School in London, they decided not to take their final exams at the German school:

I would like to highlight a few themes in Tina’s story of school choices. On one hand, she presents a discourse that is typical among middle-class parents in the UK, viewing comprehensive schools as ‘rough’ and too large inner city schools. It should be noted that the notions of ‘inner city’ and ‘urban’ are often codes for talking about the large racialized student body (Byrne, 2009), while the notion of ‘roughness’ alludes to working-class culture, with a sense of fear and disgust. Interestingly, it was her oldest son’s transnational educational experience of attending a grammar school in the Caribbean which made him feel he was missing out on a more disciplined and challenging education. In response, the family turned to the German School in London. This compensated for Tina’s lacking informational and cultural capital that would allow her to position her sons advantageously in the field of British education, as she puts it ‘we didn’t know where to send them’. Instead, Tina activated her ethnically specific cultural resources. To begin with, her German ‘national capital’ allowed her to gain admittance to a school for German citizens abroad. This school combined the advantages of a private education with an affordable price, since it was part-funded by the German state to enhance the mobility of its citizens while ensuring their continuing cultural and national loyalty to Germanness. For this reason the fees of about £5000 per year are less then half the average fees of private schools in London, £11,361 in 2008 (BBC, 2008). Second, in order to equip her sons with the necessary cultural resource of German language knowledge, Tina activated her social capital of having family members with whom her children could stay in Germany to improve her children’s language skills. Tina’s strategy to send her sons to the German School helped her to compensate for her lack of British local informational capital on how to gain advantageous access to ‘good’ secondary schools in London. Enrolling the children at the German School also compensated for a lack of economic capital, her German national capital allowed her access to subsidized private education, which she could not afford on the regular British market.

However, Tina’s story shows that ethnically specific cultural and social resources can do more than compensate for a lack of local and national cultural capital. When her sons use their ‘good education’ acquired at the German School to transfer to British secondary schools to achieve better results in their school leaving exams, they use the differential value of cultural resources in the German and the British educational fields to their advantage. Making use of the ‘better’ German education to achieve higher marks in the British educational field is a way of positioning themselves as players of two nationally bounded educational fields, partaking simultaneously in both. They attempt to extract value precisely from the difference in cultural currencies, much like speculators in international money currency transfers. Here I am not evaluating the efficiency or success of these strategies, the important point to note is that making use of the differential forms and value of cultural capital in the two national contexts engenders a transnational social space.

Conclusion

Levitt and Glick Schiller conceptualize migrants as actors who are anchored but pivot ‘between a new land and a transnational incorporation’; arguing that movement and settlement are not linear or sequential but change direction over time. Therefore, they suggest that transnational experience is best viewed as ‘simultaneity of connection’ to the new land and the homeland (2004: 1011). People living in transnational social spaces ‘experience multiple loci and layers of power and are shaped by them, but they can also act back upon them’ (Levitt and Glick Schiller, 2004: 1013). Tina and her sons experience the different national educational systems and institutions as loci of power that shape their access to ‘good education’, but they also act back on these national educational institutions by speculating with the value of their cultural resources across national boundaries. Kelly and Lusis (2006) demonstrate how migrants can benefit from converting resources acquired in the new country into cultural capital in the country of origin. I suggest that Tina’s case shows that migrants can use the very quality of transnational simultaneity to extract added value. The cultural resources (German language knowledge) and national capital (citizenship, familial connections) acquired through Tina’s participation in a transnational German space, enabled her sons’ private education at a price the family could afford. Membership of a German transnational space allowed them to access private education subsidized by the German state; this shows that national capital should not be viewed as the opposite of transnational social space, instead both are closely intertwined. Yet, her sons strategically deployed what Tina describes as the higher educational standards of the German School to gain advantageous positioning in the British educational field: they used the knowledge acquired in the German School to achieve higher marks in the British secondary school leaving exams. I suggest we conceptualize the way in which Tina and her sons make use of the differential value of cultural resources in the German and the British educational fields as a form of transnational cultural currency speculation, which in turn contributes to creating a transnational social space.

Levitt and Glick Schiller point out that some individuals are central to building transnational connections:

… there may be one central individual who maintains high levels of homeland contact and is the node through which information, resources, and identities flow. While other individuals may not identify with or take action based on those ties, the fact that they are part of the same transnational social field keeps them informed and connected so that they can act if events motivate them to do so. (2004: 1009)

These processes are gendered insofar as they reinscribe the central role of mothers in transmitting cultural capital on a transnational scale. In this study mothers acted as nodal points of transnational connection for their children and, at times, also partners. Mothers took responsibility for the schooling decisions, even in households where the father was not a migrant and could thus be expected to have a higher volume of national and local cultural and social capital. In this way, the mothers’ gendered responsibility for their children’s education and familial symbolic capital contributes to creating a transnational social space. These mothers mobilize their status as privileged migrants from European countries to convert cultural resources of Europeanness into capital on the British, nationally bounded educational field. They can be seen as speculating with the different valuation of specific resources in the two nationally defined educational institutions to extract added value for their children’s educational profiles.

Following Bourdieu, the field is both constituted by and constitutive of the players. It is by engaging in the game that players confirm the value of the prize. While national institutions continue to dominate the validation of secondary educational credentials in Europe, the value of ‘cosmopolitan capital’ (cf. Weenink, 2007) is increasingly recognized. By bargaining about the value of cultural capital in the field of education on a transnational scale and by engaging in transnational currency speculation, Tina and other migrant mothers constitute themselves as subjects in a transnational space. These processes are spurred by intensifying intra-European mobility practices of middle-class, privileged European migrants (Koikkalainen, 2011). These emergent practices rearticulate the relationship between nationally bounded and transnational cultural resources. In this context, migrant mothers’ involvement in educational choices is a particularly rich topic of study, as it explores how two key sites for the constitution of the nation – family and schooling – articulate emergent cultural fields which relate national and transnational processes of validation. The migrant mothers in this study certainly form transnational spaces. Further research is needed to explore whether they succeed in creating transnational social fields in the stricter, Bourdieusian sense, in which they strive to position themselves as privileged players with a feel for the game in a transnational field, thus creating new transnational sources of distinction.