This book examines the relationship between migration and socioeconomic status. In particular, it charts a set of middle-class aspirations that lead people to move to a nearby nation that is similar in wealth and social indicators – a type of horizontal relocation that it terms "sideways migration." It chronicles the experiences of a diverse group of French middle-class citizens who moved to London during the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Based on longitudinal ethnographic fieldwork over a ten-year period, this book engages at length with their strategies of emplacement through the lens of Pierre Bourdieu's concept of social space. Against a backdrop of heightened anxieties about immigration, the disruptions of the Brexit process and, more recently, a pandemic, it shows how middle-class migration is affected by processes of dislocation and relocation, settling and unsettling, and the search for belonging. This book points to new directions for understanding transnationalism among middle-class migrants through its consideration of the French emigration apparatus and the role of the multisite French nation in the lives of its citizens living abroad. It will be key reading for scholars and students interested in emigration and migration from anthropology, sociology, geography, political science, history, and international studies.
Acknowledgments
Prologue
Introduction
Chapter 1: London as a Space of Possibilities
Chapter 2: Emplacements and Dislocations
Chapter 3: Fieldwork in "Brexit Times"
Chapter 4: The French Emigration Apparatus
Chapter 5: French Imaginaries of London Life
Conclusion
References Cited
Index
Biography
Deborah Reed-Danahay is Professor of Anthropology at the University at Buffalo. Her recent books include Bourdieu and Social Space: Mobilities, Trajectories, Emplacements (2020) and the edited volume Anthropological Approaches to Reading Migrant Writing (w/H. Wulff, 2024). She co-edits the book series Palgrave Studies in Literary Anthropology and is a former president of the Society for the Anthropology of Europe. She holds the title of Chevalier dans l'Ordre des Palmes Académiques, conferred by the French government.
