This call aims to gather papers that investigate migrants’ insertion into European societies drawing inspiration from Bourdieu’s analysis. The 21^st IMISCOE (International Migration Research Network) conference has reflexivity as its theme. It is arguable that few other sociological thinkers put the issue of epistemological reflexivity at the centre of their theoretical framework than Bourdieu. This entailed a reflexivity of both the position of the theorist, and connected with this, the concepts that they were using in order to understand and explain the social world. Such a reflexivity would of course also extend to the concepts used by migration scholars.

Argument

Pierre Bourdieu has often been described as a structuralist thinker (Calhoun, 1993) prone to determinism (Jenkins, 1982; Goldthorpe, 2007) and whose theories remained marked by an insurmountable methodological nationalism (Wimmer, Glick-Schiller, 2003).

However, differing readings of the author have been gaining ground recently. While not denying that Bourdieu has produced theorisations within national frameworks, the concepts developed by the French author are increasingly used in migration studies and in transnational ones (Kim, 2018). For instance several scholars brought the concept of habitus on a transnational level (Patel, Conklin, 2009; Jung et al., 2017), opening interesting reflections on its change in crossing multiple social spaces (Soong et al., 2017; Zontini, Reynolds 2018). Others focused instead on capitals and their transmissibility across borders (Nowicka, 2013) often connected to the same analysis of migrants' habitus (Kelly, Lusis 2006). Finally, there have been attempts to re-spatialise Bourdieu's theories (Reed-Danahay, 2004), constructing transnational spaces (Reed-Danahay, 2017; Rye, 2019) and transnational fields (Calabretta, 2022) in which migrants act and position themselves.

As evidenced by these studies, bringing Bourdieu's theories into the field of migration studies is not only possible but brings undoubted heuristic benefits, as well as a more solid anchoring in social theory, an issue long lacking in migration studies (Hollifield, 2020). In fact, Bourdieu has produced a holistic theory that addresses relevant issues for migration studies, such as the analysis of social stratification, the construction of the State and its thought, the symbolic hierarchies that cross society, the individual incorporation of dispositions and their change.

Based on these premises, the call aims to gather papers that investigate migrants' insertion into European societies drawing inspiration from Bourdieu's analysis. The 21^st IMISCOE conference has reflexivity as its theme. It is arguable that few other sociological thinkers put the issue of epistemological reflexivity at the centre of their theoretical framework than Bourdieu. This entailed a reflexivity of both the position of the theorist, and connected with this, the concepts that they were using in order to understand and explain the social world. Such a reflexivity would of course also extend to the concepts used by migration scholars.

Some issues to be addressed could be:

• How does the symbolic monopoly of the State reassert itself in the management of migration and in the acts of naming that affect the foreign population? How does migration - through Bourdieu and Sayad - unveil State thought?
• What are the problems with some of the concepts, and folk taxonomies, scholars of migration employ in their studies of migration and do they reproduce a common sense doxa?
• How can the concept of social space be used at a supra-national level? How do migrants fit into the different social spaces they traverse and how do their multiple transnational positioning interact in this process?
• How do migrants manage to convert their departure capitals in the process of migration? What social trajectories in the country of settlement emerge? What are their intergenerational trends?
• How is the migrants' class positioning in their transnational spaces linked to their changing habitus and possible hysteresis? How do identity and consumption practices reveal and interact with their class positioning?

Submission guidelines

We welcome theoretical and empirical submissions from any methodological perspective. Proposals of 200-250 words can be submitted at andrea.calabretta@phd.unipd.it

Deadline for submission is September 23.

Convenors

• Steven Loyal – University College Dublin
• Andrea Calabretta – University of Padua