Interconnecting boundaries of identity and belonging and hierarchy-making within transnational mobility studies: Framing inequalities

Abstract

The article explores the collision and collusion between inequalities and identities with a focus on transnational mobilities. The author engages critically with the notions of identity and belonging before exploring racism, and integration and diversity discourses and practices, as ways in which non-belongings become shaped and reinforced. Belonging and identity simultaneously raise the question about boundaries of ‘difference’ and ‘identity’ and how they are struggled over but also relate to how people are placed hierarchically within societal systems of resource allocation and inequality. Struggles about membership, entitlements and belonging become ever more politicized where there is competition over resources in the translocational and transnational spaces of today’s world. Racisms forge and reconstitute forms of non-belonging which are central to inequalities, and as forms of boundary- and hierarchy-making, mark the boundaries in particularly violent and dehumanizing ways. Diversity and integration discourses are discussed in relation to European developments in the management of migration, with a particular focus on the UK. They are regarded as being underpinned by a hierarchization, culturalization and essentialization of difference. Finally, the article explores the potential of a ‘translocational’ and intersectional frame for understanding the transnational positioning of social actors in terms of hierarchy and inequality.