Current Sociology

This issue of Current Sociology Monographs explores new conceptual opportunities at the intersection of migration studies and the sociology of class. The contributions examine migration as a distinct site where class is translated and transformed, using rich, empirically specific cases to show how social class is experienced and produced relationally, transnationally and temporally through the lives of migrants. Through this focus, the papers conceptualise class as a mobile process that travels with migrants, links different contexts and is translated through movement. Distinct from paradigms that tend to universalise a particular narrative or definition of class, this issue adopts a comparative and inductive approach aimed at exploring tensions between the universal and the particular. The contributions share a commitment to qualitative enquiry that attends to the particular, affective and experiential dimensions of class as shared and expressed by migrants, using these as an entry point to retheorise class ‘on the move’. Incorporating ethnography, life histories, intergenerational approaches and spatial mapping, the authors inductively examine how class shapes migrants’ lived experiences in diverse contexts. Some researchers follow participants across borders, whereas others trace the imaginative trajectories through which migrants recall and explain their movements. Contributions orient their analyses around relationality, transnationality and temporality, showing how class emerges as inherently processual and mobile, linking the personal and the global, the embodied and the institutional, and pasts and futures. Each link foregrounds translation and transformation as both an empirical process and a methodological sensibility, demonstrating how migration unsettles the taken-for-granted and provides opportunities to reconsider established theories of class.

This article examines how national identity operates as form of a classed distinction within Dubai’s market economy, shaped by restrictive migration regimes and embedded hierarchies between nationals and non-nationals. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork at the textile market in Dubai, United Arab Emirates (UAE), this article argues that class is not simply imported by migrants from their countries of origin, but actively co-produced through legal and symbolic hierarchies in the host context. Emirati nationals, supported by legal protections and symbolic capital, occupy dominant economic and social positions in the market, transforming it into a stage for entrepreneurial display and status performance. In contrast, non-nationals navigate their structurally constrained roles, where ethnoracial status is frequently conflated with class, while gender and religion further shape the performance and contestation of classed identity. These dynamics illustrate how classed subjectivities emerge within a spectacle of exclusion and differentiation, wherein social status is performed through national belonging. By tracing the intersections, this article contributes to emerging scholarship on class formation in migration contexts, offering a deeper understanding of how national identity redefines the contours of class.

Flight trajectories are not only a matter of spatial mobility but are also concerned with social mobility. Class dynamics shape possibilities for action and the character of refugees’ networks. Moving or being forced to move and the planning of routes and destinations are closely interrelated with the migrant’s class at the outset of their journey. Migration is also related to previous trajectories of social mobility and the transmission of resources, knowledge and practices. Based on research on processes of flight from the war in Syria since 2011, in this article, we propose the reconstruction of life histories and family histories over several generations as a means of better understanding the relationship between class and (forced) migration. We argue that to reconstruct processes of social mobility in the context of flight, it is necessary to embed these processes in their socio-historical contexts in addition to considering the extent to which class positions are spatially bound or valid across different spaces. We shall detail these considerations while reconstructing the course of a migration from a multigenerational perspective – specifically, the social rise and fall over four generations of a Syriac Orthodox family who moved to Germany from the Syria–Turkey border. The study of the relationship between social mobility and migration requires consideration of the processes of class formation in the region of origin (a region characterised by postcolonial and socialist state formation) in relation to the region of arrival (the genesis of a migrant working class) and the transnational connections between both regions.

Recent sociological scholarship in the United Kingdom deploys the concept of the ‘intergenerational self’ to think about class misidentification in the context of upward social mobility. In this article, we argue that the concept of the ‘intergenerational self’ proves especially fruitful when deployed to think about personal migration histories. We draw on our recent study of cross-class relationships in Australia to argue that in the context of spatial mobilities scholarly attention should be focused on the intergenerational transmission of class and the complexities of its subjective and affective inheritance under new conditions. In the process, we engage the concept of the ‘intergenerational self’ to new ends, exploring the ways our research participants gestured to, grappled with and strived to honour family legacies. In this article, we delve into three research participants’ class-origin stories from our 38 in-depth interviews. These selected life stories pivot around migration, the legacies of family class positions, and the forces of racialisation and racism in the transmission and transformation of class capital and identity in Australia. We explore our interviewees’ efforts to remember and respect their parents’ and grandparents’ complex realities and struggles within their own narratives about class identification. The ‘intergenerational self’ thus helps us understand the way our research participants faced the class contradictions, misrecognition and opportunities that migration and racialisation had afforded, ultimately highlighting the significance of familial class legacies within class identities.

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2021 and 2024, this article presents an empirical investigation of the aspirations and educational strategies of Indian students pursuing medical education in the post-Soviet country Georgia. Contrary to the stereotype often connected to international student migration, the students in this study are not a part of an affluent global middle-class, nor have they grown up in internationally oriented families with long traditions of medical doctors. Their decision to pursue education in Georgia is motivated by ambitions of social mobility and, as part of this pursuit, the goal of securing a sustainable livelihood in India. The students arrive in Georgia armed with the hope that an international degree will have an ‘escalator effect’, entailing that a spatial move will facilitate a social mobility outcome. The success of their mobility project is, however, far from assured. Upon returning to their homeland, India – where most students intend to practice – a rigorous and highly competitive screening test with a very low pass rate awaits them. This article highlights how the journey of Indian aspiring medical doctors is precarious, best understood as a ‘high-risk’ educational strategy. Despite investing 6 years in studies abroad, obtaining the anticipated medical licence remains uncertain. Therefore, these students’ stories are not defined by assured success but by a blend of hope, ambition, and the possibility of both progress and substantial challenges.