Migration,class and the intergenerational self in contemporary Australia: Exploring family legacies

Abstract

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.

Introduction

This article draws on our recent study of cross-class relationships in Australia, a multicultural settler nation, in which we centred migration as vital to the contemporary production of class from the outset (Butler and Vincent, 2024). In this article, we argue that in the context of migration and spatial mobility, attention should be focused on the intergenerational transmission of class and the complexities of its subjective and affective inheritance under new conditions. To do this, we engage the concept of the ‘intergenerational self’ (Friedman et al., 2021) to probe the different ways that interviewees in our research grappled with the complex class legacies of their family’s migration experience, and how these legacies informed their subjective class identities in the present.

After summarising the notion of the ‘intergenerational self’ within class research in the next section, and noting some limitations, we proceed to develop an argument for its heightened utility in interpreting narratives that deal with migration. This argument necessitates a truncated summary of Australian migration history, to which we next turn. After presenting this short history, we explain the parameters and methods of our larger study of cross-class relationships.

We then delve into three research participants’ class-origin stories, selected from our 38 in-depth interviews. These three particular interviewees were selected for close examination in this article because of the richly complex theoretical and interpretive dilemmas each of their narratives give rise to. Indeed, these three participants themselves were highly aware of these interpretive challenges and sought explicit dialogue with us about the complexity of their class position and their feelings around it. Our discussion of the themes of each of these three interviews is interwoven with their biographical stories through which their intergenerational classed selves were narrated. These sections deal in turn with the experiences of: Manisha, whose extended natal family migrated from Sri Lanka to Australia in the early 1990s, travelling with skilled and family visas; Claire, whose parents migrated from South Wales to Australia in the mid-1970s, with skilled visas that enabled permanent settlement; and Linh, whose parents fled the Vietnam War and were accepted into Australia as humanitarian refugees. While travelling to Australia under different visa programmes that led to permanent residency and citizenship, all three hail from the 1970s to 1990s, enabling us to also engage with significant periods of Australia’s migration programme. As we will show, the ‘intergenerational self’ helps us understand the way these three participants narrated and made sense of the class contradictions, misrecognition and opportunities that migration and racialisation had afforded both themselves and their antecedents.

The notion and limits of ‘the intergenerational self’ in class research

Friedman et al. (2021) use the notion of the ‘intergenerational self’ from social psychology (Fivush et al., 2008) to explain how and why participants in their own UK-based research identified as working-class, despite hailing from middle-class families. Most sociological understandings of class, they argue, citing the highly influential works of Pierre Bourdieu and John Goldthorpe, have assumed that our class identity is strongly shaped by our childhood experiences. This framing, based on a wider field dealing with social stratification, has long taken for granted a ‘two generation view’ (Mare, 2011, in Friedman et al., 2021: 720) which assumes that a child’s inculcation of dispositions and resources will flow from their parents’ class destination (e.g. Bourdieu, 1984). In a separate critique of how inequality is conceptualised, Mare (2011: 8) argues that the two-generation (parent-to-offspring) view of ‘multigenerational influence’ – the kind used in class studies based on stratification models – omits important sources of intergenerational continuity of family-based social inequality. For example, wealth can be augmented through investments that are not tied to the lives of individuals, such as housing. This can uncouple people from relying on the kinds of ‘perishable and uncertain forms of wealth’ obtained through education and employment (Mare, 2011: 9), particularly in today’s asset economy (Adkins et al., 2020). Yet a focus on middle-class social reproduction through a two-generation model assuming the direct parental transmission of class capital dominates research into class (Mare, 2011).

In contrast, the idea of the ‘intergenerational self’ offers insights into a more ‘temporally extended self’, constituted not only by parents’ occupations but also the stories about their own pasts, childhoods and extended family and kin that parents share with children – multigenerational family histories within which we all build our sense of self (Friedman et al., 2021: 720). A nice summary of this approach lies in the phrase: ‘Part of who a person is defined by the experiences of his or her parents and their parents before them’ (Fivush et al., 2008: 134). Furthermore, this perspective assumes that our construction of the self relies on an evaluative perspective of our own personal history and of how this personal history fits into larger cultural and historical frameworks (Fivush et al., 2008: 131).

We note also that Fivush et al.’s (2008) social psychology study advancing the idea of the intergenerational self has limitations from a sociological and anthropological perspective. First, we flag that kinship is historically and culturally variable. An emphasis on vertical kinship ties – expressed by Fivush et al. (2008: 134) as one’s ‘parents and their parents before them’ – is not universal. To be clear, within our interviews vertical kinship models were generally central, even if some interviewees talked about cousins, aunts and uncles. Second, psychology studies often exhibit a strong class bias (see, for instance, the discussion in Walkerdine and Lucey, 1989, especially p. 29). In their own work, Fivush et al. (2008: 137) point to an example of a series of dinner time conversations within middle-class families which often include the ‘retelling of family vacations’, and which they analyse to form the basis for universalising conclusions. Yet our book (Butler and Vincent, 2024) includes a chapter on ‘holidays’, as vacations are referred to in Australia, which shows that the opportunity to rest and/or experience travel is of course unequally distributed along class lines. Finally, we note that other theoretical vocabularies for grappling with the intergenerational transmission of class identity are emerging, and these place more emphasis on feelings. Fivush et al.’s work is influenced by Vygotksy’s theories of socio-cultural development and thus regards ‘language-based social interaction’ as the critical object of analysis (Fivush et al., 2008: 132). More recent sociological work on class transmission extends beyond this emphasis on language, attempting to grasp a more ‘ephemeral realm’ and exploring the way the ‘felt, the unsaid, the unspeakable, the traces of class are passed down the generations’ (Walkerdine, 2023: 478). In a similar vein, Tinkler et al. (2024: 38) develop the idea of ‘resonances’, a notion which embraces the ‘subjective, affective and embodied/sensory’ effects of one’s formative experiences, which like us they also call ‘legacies’. We thus use the concept of the intergenerational self with an eye to what it offers us, but with an awareness of what the concept may occlude or fall short of grasping.

Friedman et al. (2021) deploy the concept of the intergenerational self productively, interrogating the tendency for their British interviewees to claim their class origin (the class status of their natal family) as working class, despite having grown up within middle-class families. They focus on 36 participants whose ‘objective’ class backgrounds, based on their parents’ education and occupation, was middle class (professional and managerial professions), but who subjectively identified as hailing from working-class backgrounds or being ‘long-range upwardly mobile’ (Friedman et al., 2021: 721). These interviewees offered accounts of their class backgrounds that drew on extended family genealogies, elaborating, for example, details of their grandparents’ occupations in explaining their own class identification. And while these participants offered ‘perfectly accurate readings’ of their family’s class history, Friedman et al. (2021) argue that these multigenerational stories ultimately served to ‘deflect from the substantial privileges associated with these interviewees own middle-class upbringings’ (pp. 720, 724, emphasis in original). In that context, crafting an intergenerational self essentially worked to powerful effect in a social environment where meritocratic ideas around social mobility and ‘leveling up’ have long been endorsed and celebrated in policy, despite lacking in evidence (Littler, 2018). By identifying as coming from a working-class family, their participants were able to tell a story of upward, meritocratic career success and erase or obscure the structural privileges of their upbringings that had enabled this trajectory. Importantly, these narratives had enhanced cache in their fields of employment in the arts and culture industries – highly precarious industries that rely on substantial class capital to succeed (Friedman et al., 2021: 717–719, 728).

Migration stories and the intergenerational self

We argue in this article that it is especially fruitful to bring the idea of the intergenerational self into dialogue with migration studies. The field of migration studies itself has exhibited a recent concerted (re)turn to class as a vital axis of power and inequality, as this volume attests (see also Cederberg, 2017; Colic-Peisker, 2008; Van Hear, 2014; Coates et al, 2026; Butler et al, forthcoming). We thus build on Fivush et al.’s (2008) argument, and its sociological deployment by Friedman et al. (2021), whereby a sense of one’s classed self is scaffolded from a personal history shaped by family stories, and that the very practice of ‘family reminiscing’ leads us to develop an intergenerational self. To reiterate, this, as Fivush et al. (2008: 132) continue produces ‘a self that is defined as much by one’s place in a familial history as a personal past’. Friedman et al. do not use the ‘intergenerational self’ to talk about migration or transnational locations of class identification. However, more recently Friedman and Aaron Reeves acknowledge that the intergenerational self is ‘particularly complex for people with a migration story in their extended family’ (Reeves and Friedman, 2024: 46).

We develop this last observation in this article, showing that thinking about the intergenerational self in relation to family migration histories, helps us move beyond the ‘parent-to-offspring’ model of class transmission that has been central to sociological models of class identification. We argue it provides a flexibility in conceptualising personal and familial histories of class identity and resource accumulation in the context of spatial mobilities. This can assist scholars to think more specifically about how such resources and dispositions are converted into forms of class capital under new conditions, and in ways that are central to the transnational transmission of class (Heiman et al., 2012; Rye, 2019; Butler and Vincent, 2024). However, our emphasis throughout is on the subjective and affective inheritances of family migration in the past, through which our interviewees sought to understand and explain their class circumstances in the present. This emphasis is glossed by us throughout as ‘legacies’.

Our more specific argument is twofold. We contend, first, that discussion of extended family trajectories from our participants necessitated people narrate an intergenerational self, anchored in family histories of migration and transnationalism, to account for disruptive, confronting and complex forms of social mobility – both upwards and downwards. Participants from migration and transnationally-mobile backgrounds narrated intergenerational selves in an effort to grapple with and honour the often-weighty and sometimes confusing inheritances of migration. This included its attendant class transitions, slippages, exploitation and opportunities that have long been noted by migration scholars (e.g. Miraftab, 2016; Parreñas, 2001). This is particularly important in spatial mobility contexts given the varying ways that class is configured in different nation states and may be complicated by ethnicity, caste, religion and gender (Heiman et al., 2012). While a Western European model of sociological analysis might define these as ‘incorrect’ forms of class identification based on the ‘two-generation’ model (which may well make sense when needing reproducible indicators to measure class mobility as a lens into social inequality), we find it more generative to explore how participants draw on their class-origin identity to narrate a meaningful and coherent story about their family’s social and spatial trajectory.

Our conceptual approach demands moving beyond the inherent methodological nationalism of class in sociology, as migration scholars have elsewhere critiqued (Rutten and Verstappen, 2014; Rye, 2019). However, our second argument is that it also requires scholars bring to their analysis a critical understanding of how class is racialised in relation to specific migration trajectories within national and regional contexts, something not addressed in Friedman et al. Here we build on a history of class theorising that insists racism and racialisation shape processes of class identification, as they do the class logics that shape people’s own subjective class identities (Du Bois, 2007[1903]; Clerge, 2019; Meghji, 2019; Skeggs, 2004). This general point has Australian specificities, which we explain in the following section. Finally, we note that gender plays an important role in the transmission and transferral of class across borders (Sheba George, 2005); however, space prevents deeper engagement with this theme in this article.

Migration, race and class ambivalence in historical context

Invasion and migration were significant themes of our research into cross-class relationships from the outset. As we highlight in our book (Butler and Vincent, 2024), the movement of British class categories to Australia, which was originally a penal colony, has never involved simple transposition of these categories, and Aboriginal people were at first effectively excluded from this externally imposed and deeply racialised class system (Behrendt et al., 2022). The colonial investment in whiteness as synonymous with moral worth and racial purity was codified in the twentieth century White Australia Policy. As is well known, the White Australia Policy sought to limit migration to Australia to people from white British origins (including those of Irish heritage) (Collins, 1998). Concurrently, Aboriginal people were governed under repressive state-based acts representing the prevailing ideology of biological and social absorption into White Australia (Ellinghaus, 2003).

A more substantial engagement with migration policy in Australia’s 20th century is not the focus of this article; however, key well-documented points are important to reiterate here. After the Second World War, the White Australia Policy was expanded to include migrants from other parts of first Northern then Southern Europe. This policy favoured manual workers, with migrants commonly channelled into low-level, manual entry jobs (Stratton and Ang, 1994). Thousands of displaced people from Europe were resettled in Australia from the 1950s and early 1960s. In the late 1970s people began arriving originally in boats, from Vietnam, Laos and parts of Cambodia, seeking asylum (Phillips and Klapdor, 2010). Lebanese Muslims and Maronite Christians settled in Australia in large numbers throughout the late 1970s and 1980s, escaping a protracted civil war (Collins, 2005). These migrants were also largely absorbed into the nation’s manual workforce and it was not uncommon for people with non-white, non-English speaking backgrounds to experience downward social mobility coming into this system. In sum, up until the 1980s, being ‘ethnic’ in Australia was perceived as synonymous with being working class (Colic-Peisker, 2011; Piperoglou, 2021).

The White Australia Policy was formally abolished in 1973. Subsequently, there was a dramatic reduction in the number of ‘low-skilled’ migrants accepted into the nation’s migration programme as the manufacturing industry declined (Colic-Peisker, 2011). From the 1970s to 1990s, immigration became focused on four groups: skilled migrants (selected by a Points Assessment Test), family migrants, humanitarian settlers, and ‘Others’ (Hugo, 2014). From the 1990s, with the introduction of the points system, Australia’s migration scheme shifted concertedly away from permanent settlement to the creation of flexible migrant labour forces to target particular skills gaps. This emphasis on temporary migration saw migrants being ‘screened and selected’ for their ability to rapidly integrate into the labour market and create minimal burden on social services (Robertson and Runganaikaloo, 2014).

Studying cross-class relationships

This article grows out of a larger study into cross-class relationships in contemporary Australia, undertaken between 2020 and 2022. This research involved us interviewing 38 people from 23 cross-class relationships about their experience of forming a romantic partnership with a person who grew up within a class-origin family they perceived as being different to their own (which we later analysed through objective and subjective indicators of class status). We spoke with members of 15 couples whom we interviewed separately, and a further eight individuals whose partners chose not to take part. All but one of the couples we recruited was heterosexual. Our interviewees hailed from a range of geographic milieus that encompassed highly urban environments, regional areas and remote Australia.

Our research confirmed the existence of a highly differentiated class society in contemporary Australia (Bennett et al., 2021) ranging along a spectrum from self-nominated terms ‘welfare class’ to those who self-identified as ‘very wealthy’. Yet, while class scholars in Western European contexts have long argued that interviewees are likely to over identify as middle class, including in Australia (Irwin, 2015; Savage, 2000), and with the United Kingdom being an outlier to this trend (Friedman et al., 2021), our data yielded significantly different results. Participants described their subjective class identities in ways that were much closer to their objective class position than is commonly reported in class research. We explore this difference in Love Across Class and the fact that sustained negotiations across class within intimate relationships often propelled attempts at far more frank conversations about class and a closer scrutiny of their own classed upbringing (Butler and Vincent, 2024).

In light of the abridged structural and racial history of Australia’s migration programme offered above, which underpins the persistent whitening of class discourse in Australia and the centring of the nation as a fixed unit of analysis, we positioned migration as central to the study of contemporary class in Australia when designing our larger research project. As part of this research we asked interviewees to nominate their cultural background. Our participants self-described themselves as Australian, white Australian, white, ‘Eurasian’, ‘mixed race’, ‘brown’, Aboriginal, Jewish, Vietnamese, Sri Lankan, English, Māori, and Turkish, among other ancestries.

The interview process included a semi-structured interview with five sections on childhood; relationship background; similarities and differences within the relationship; parenting (if relevant); and questions about class and the research process, in which we asked participants questions specifically about their class origin and class destination. We deliberately refrained from offering class labels but encouraged interviewees to self-nominate their class identities to us and to elaborate on the reasoning behind their answers. Some people used this time to talk through the contradictions inherent in class identification (Wright, 2005). Again, we emphasise that this was particularly the case for people whose lives were transnational or anchored in family migration histories. In these instances, we asked additional clarifying questions about visa statuses and probed interviewees about their family’s class status or positioning in countries of origin.

To collect our own objective indicators of class we closed the interview with a survey which collected data on education, occupation and income, and about education and occupation of interviewee’s parents and siblings, reflecting class questionnaires of recent large-scale data sets on class and stratification in Australia (Sheppard and Biddle, 2017; Bennett et al., 2021). We also asked about homeownership and the owning of assets, alert to the centrality of intergenerational wealth transfer in class trajectories in Australia (Adkins et al., 2020).

We digitally recorded and transcribed all interviews and collaboratively coded the data, first through thematic iterative analysis and then via a detailed coding process. All names and other identifying features were altered and interviewees were offered the chance to read and amend their transcripts and draft chapters of our book where these pertained to their experiences (Butler and Vincent, 2024).

Manisha’s intergenerational story about class, migration and family work histories

When Manisha was two, her family migrated to Australia from Sri Lanka, travelling with skilled and family visas. They migrated with her maternal aunt’s family including her uncle, who also obtained a skilled visa, and their children. Once in Melbourne, the two families lived and raised their children side-by-side. Manisha’s father became her family’s primary earner, working long hours as a chef and later taking on a second job in catering. In Sri Lanka, her father had finished high school and then undertaken ‘some sort of culinary diploma’. Manisha did not know much about her paternal grandparents.

Manisha’s maternal grandfather had been a public servant and diplomat, and had worked in Singapore when Manisha’s mother was a child. Stories about this antecedent’s working life were an important part of Manisha’s childhood. When he returned to Sri Lanka, her grandfather ‘started working in the private sector’ and became an editor of ‘one of the bigger newspapers’. Manisha shared these intergenerational stories with us – a sense of personal identity defined as much by one’s place in a familial history as a personal past (Fivush et al., 2008: 132) – through the vocabulary of both ‘class’ and ‘caste’. Their significance crystallised around descriptions of her mother’s former life in Sri Lanka. Had her mother’s family stayed in Sri Lanka, Manisha reflected, they might have enjoyed a ‘higher caste’ lifestyle. It would have been ‘an easier life’ in some ways, she insisted; her mother may have had herself ‘a few promotions’ in the job she held in a marketing company. This company held offices in Melbourne, and in preparation for the move, her mother had obtained letters so ‘that she could have transferred into a role at [company name] here in Australia’.

Manisha surmises her mum did not pursue this possibility once in Melbourne because of the difficulties she faced securing trusted care for two-year-old Manisha: ‘I think she felt uncomfortable being in a new country to leave me with people that she didn’t know’. Manisha’s mother did not feel it was ‘fair’ to burden or isolate her own sister with whom she had migrated. Soon after settling in Melbourne, her parents had a second child, ‘and then I do remember mum trying to look for work at some stage but it just, she obviously wasn’t successful’ (emphasis in original).

Manisha described how her parents sought ‘better’ opportunities through school choice and moving residence. For the first three years, they rented a flat in the inner city, before buying a house in Melbourne’s northern suburbs, where they lived for the next decade. In moving to this area, Manisha’s family encountered a side of suburban Australia that was utterly unfamiliar and which they seemed to have experienced as threatening. We note that Manisha also held much more vivid memories of this period of her life, likely owing to her age. Manisha depicted this suburb as being comprised of ‘a lot of Centrelink kind of people’, a reference to social security receipt (see Vincent, 2023) and ‘very working class, I guess’. In moving to this neighbourhood, ‘we all experienced a big shift in terms of, our parents were really protective and security-wise’. Manisha’s family’s impression of inadequacy extended to her local ‘public’ primary school, which she described as ‘quite rough’. Manisha’s portrait of this suburb is evocative. She talked of ‘bars on the windows’, a ‘locked gate’, and her parents’ unwillingness to let them leave the house without supervision. We also read this emphasis on physical security, anxiety and absence of trust as directly related to the loss of ontological security through migration. We refer to the process of migrant ‘home-building’ that Hage (1998: 102-3) describes, where to feel at home entails fostering feelings of security, familiarity, community and sense of possibility.

As Manisha’s family’s financial fortunes stabilised, the family bought a larger house in a ‘wealthier area’, where Manisha observed her parents became ‘a lot more relaxed’. This upwardly-mobile move represented a return to a more middle-class social and geographical world that felt more familiar to Manisha’s mother. In her last year of primary school, Manisha also began to attend a high fee ‘private’ school, where she remained to complete high school. Her sister joined her a few years later, and her dad had needed to ‘work a couple of jobs at one stage as well just to be able to afford school fees’.

Importantly, Manisha’s reflections on her parents’ search for ‘a better environment’, were punctuated with descriptions of the labour they extolled to make these transitions happen. Her father has always worked ‘incredibly hard’, Manisha explained, and still does. ‘My dad, I can say, is probably the hardest worker I know. And he still is. So, I don’t know anyone from friends and family who’s worked as hard as he has’. Now in his 60s, her dad still works night shifts. Manisha explained to us this is why, ‘deep down’, she feels working class, ‘coming from my dad’. Manisha’s extended family is now part of a transnational and mobile Sri Lankan middle class that ‘spans a couple of countries’.

In talking about her class background, classed present and aspirations for the future, Manisha necessarily narrated an intergenerational self. This was essential to be able to account for the complexities of her family’s initial downward class and ‘caste’ mobility upon migrating, and her parents’ determined striving to find their place within a transnational, Sri Lankan middle class. While Manisha didn’t use the word ‘sacrifice’ herself, the theme of sacrifice and the centrality of ‘hard work’ were key themes of her interview. Sociologists have long argued that such sacrifices – of labour, family and migration – together create feelings of indebtedness, and are entangled with complex and affective relations of faithfulness and gratitude (Coleman, 2022: 63). Affective relations are always deeply embedded in a wider, complex microcosm of emotions and reciprocities within transnational family life (Skrbis, 2008). However, Manisha’s class identification as working class ‘deep down’ communicates and forges a respectful link to the legacy of her parents’ experience, which in turn is linked to their natal and extended family in Sri Lanka.

Finally, Manisha was acutely aware of her position as a ‘brown’ woman in Australia, where whiteness remains hegemonic six decades after the end of the White Australia Policy. She had experienced exoticisation and racist assumptions in her dating life before partnering with James, and wondered out loud in her interview about the meaning of essentially belonging to the ‘lesser privileged part of’ the global population. While she was reluctant to draw conclusions about this topic, Manisha carried pertinent questions of the future as she anticipated having children with her partner James, himself a white British migrant from a middle-class family. ‘How will they identify? Will they identify as Sri Lankan? Will they identify as English or Scottish or Australian? [W]ill their skin colour dictate how far they get in life, as well? Or will we influence it for them?’ In sum, in Manisha’s own words, ‘class’, ‘caste’, as well as ‘being brown’, were central to the necessarily intergenerational story she shared with us about her class identity, as well as her reflections about her life with James, her desires for their future and her place in Australia as a brown woman.

Claire’s intergenerational story: the significance of whiteness, and migrating to a class-stratified city

Claire is white, in her thirties, and lives with her partner, Gavan, in a rented share house in the city of Newcastle on the New South Wales coast. Claire’s parents first migrated from South Wales to Australia in the mid-1970s. One of her grandpas had been a teacher in Wales, and before that her family were miners. Her mum came from ‘small shop people’; her nan was a cleaner. Both Claire’s mum and dad studied teaching at a vocational college, but there was little work available at the time. The Whitlam government was offering ‘free tickets’ to Australia and, like other young people in South Wales at the time, they were keen to get out.

In Australia, Claire told us, her parents moved to Western Sydney because they ‘knew some Welsh person’ living there and quickly found teaching work. They then moved further west, and in time bought a house in Campbelltown. They had ‘known nothing’ of ‘the class composition’ of Sydney, a starkly geographically stratified city on class terms (Coleman, 2022), when they first arrived, Claire told us. Her dad loved Campbelltown: he was ‘down-to-earth’ and felt a cultural affinity with working-class suburbia. Claire’s mum felt otherwise: she worried they had squandered the chance for class mobility that migration represented for them, and she felt out of place in the class culture of Campbelltown. Claire’s mother hated that others saw them as ‘Westie trash’, Claire remarked. This term conveys the pejorative associations with Sydney’s west in this period (Simic, 2008). ‘If only I’d known’, her mum lamented over their move to Campbelltown rather than to a more middle-class Sydney suburb: ‘we would have had a different life’.

Part of what Claire’s mum means by this comment is that while her parents owned their house in Western Sydney, its location had not led to the kind of financial returns that others have enjoyed from the astronomical rise in value of inner-city properties and particular suburbs in Sydney (Adkins et al., 2020). When they sold their Campbelltown home, her parents moved to a coastal region, where Claire’s mum was happier. They settled among ‘mostly white people’ of their generation in an area that has become more affluent after they moved there. This trajectory contrasted with the suburb they left behind, a neighbourhood that has ‘become less white and seems to have gotten much more poor’ since her upbringing there, as Claire observed to us. Claire’s parents have recently paid off their mortgage and their current house will fund their aged care as needed.

While the opportunity for class mobility via migration was not realised for Claire’s family, initially at least, it is important to note that Claire’s mother expressed confidence in, even an expectation that, relocating from South Wales to Australia represented a chance for class advancement. This is in contrast to Manisha’s mother’s experience, whose class position slid as a result of their move to Australia from Sri Lanka. (This is not to mischaracterise migrants from the United Kingdom to Australia as predominantly middle class: from the 1950s, assisted passage provided a means for many working-class migrants from the United Kingdom to settle in Australia, initially to join the post-war manual labour force (see Peel, 1995: 113–115). What we highlight here is that the direct translation of Claire’s parents’ class position after migration to Australia can be explained in part by their whiteness.

Claire’s story highlights the ongoing significance of racialisation in the Australian policy, whereby whiteness is normalised and treated as synonymous with ‘Australian’. Growing up in outer Western Sydney with her white, Welsh-born parents, Claire remembers going to school alongside and sharing her neighbourhood streets with Filipino, Sri Lankan, Indian, Chinese and Islander families as well as Aboriginal ones. Claire was among several of our interviewees who hailed from the outer suburbs and evoked an ‘everyday multiculturalism’ characteristic of their childhood worlds (Wise and Velayutham, 2009). Yet, Claire also sensed as a child in the 1980s and 1990s the ways her whiteness naturalised her presence in Australia by virtue of the nation’s historical immigration regime (Hage, 1998). In primary school, she noticed that teachers asked non-white migrant children, ‘Where are you from?’ and talked to them ‘about their families’. Claire thought to herself, ‘Well, my family is ages away too’, and felt she could relate to her classmates’ experiences of displacement. Wills (2004) examines the ways British migrants’ experiences of displacement and homesickness upon arriving in Australia were obscured by the notion that white Britons were readily assimilable into the white Australian polity. Even as a child, Claire questioned, ‘Why are they constantly being asked like they don’t belong here and I get treated like I belong?’ Claire’s intergenerational migration history did not result in her being othered by teachers in Australia (whose questions Claire did not represent as hostile) as it did her racialised classmates.

We own that there is an element of obfuscation at work in Claire’s emphasis on her extended intergenerational classed story that resonates with the narratives of participants in Friedman et al.’s UK study. Claire identified to us as coming from a working-class background. Yet, Claire’s teacher parents held education in high regard throughout her childhood. They were an ‘ABC-watching’ household, Claire explained, referring to the national broadcaster, and Claire’s mum helped with homework and assignments. Other kids would come to their house to study, and both parents knew how to ‘wrangle the system’. In other words, her parents understood the school system and how to maximise advantages from it for their children – knowledge and capacities long recognised as fundamental to middle-class social reproduction (Lareau, 2003). Indeed, Claire’s partner Gavan, who grew up in social housing and described his class origin as ‘welfare class’, eloquently captured Claire’s family’s social position. He told us that Claire grew up in a house with parents who were teachers and thus ‘in jobs that are socially valid’ and who ‘encouraged you to do well in school’. Claire went on to attend a selective high school that admitted students only through exam results, and then on to university where she studied humanities subjects, although her parents hoped she might do law. As in Friedman et al.’s study, identifying as working class has currency in specific social realms, and in the areas Claire has gone on to participate – political activism and academia – the downplaying and deflecting of white class privilege is common and rewarded (Sherman, 2017; for commentary on the Australian context, see Burns, 2017).

However, we also see and take seriously that through her interview Claire narrated an intergenerational self that hinged on the extended working-class family histories in South Wales, which formed an important and meaningful part of her upbringing. Hers was a narrative that wrestled with the class world her grandparents inhabited and which her parents told stories about, as well as the significance of her parents having migrated to a deeply class-stratified city with no local knowledge of the geographic distribution of wealth, advantage and poverty. Their decision to settle in outer Western Sydney has had very real and serious implications for Claire and her sibling: access to intergenerational wealth is key to housing security in Australia in the contemporary asset economy (see Adkins et al., 2020).

Linh’s intergenerational migration story: the centrality of class capital

Linh’s family were humanitarian refugees who fled the Vietnam War. They had been ‘a military family’ in Vietnam; they were wealthy, well-connected and educated professionals prior to their life in Australia. Her dad had first arrived in Melbourne and lived with his brother and other Vietnamese refugees in a hostel in Melbourne’s west. They found dangerous work in an explosives factory which ‘paid really well’, and stayed on in the hostel to save money, enabled by their ability to tolerate the food served there. ‘My uncle talks about this all the time’, Linh explained, ‘because they were around American GIs [in Vietnam] they always got army rations, and because of that, they were, like, accustomed to Western food’. This had helped them ‘save a bit of money’, enough to buy an apartment in Melbourne’s inner-western suburb of Footscray. From here, Linh’s older sister and her mother were able to join Linh’s dad in Melbourne. In time, Linh’s dad’s English language skills enabled him to retrain in IT at night while he took up low-wage manual work in the day.

Like Manisha, Linh stressed how her family ‘talks about this all the time’, referring to the way Linh’s parents and family had enfolded Linh into an intergenerational origin story that could explain their family’s class location in the present. The centrality of this intergenerational self, in Linh’s depiction of her family class origin, certainly conjures a ‘temporally extended self’ and one based in multigenerational family histories (Friedman et al., 2021: 720). Moreover for Linh, this evaluation of her personal history and how it fitted into larger cultural and historical frameworks (Fivush et al., 2008: 131) was necessary to extract the complexity and specificity of her family’s migration story from the class-flattening language of ‘multiculturalism’ and ‘cultural diversity’ so ubiquitously used in Australia. Linh had told us emphatically during her interview that ‘everything in my life, I always just understood through cultural difference’, referring to ‘diversity’ as the lens through which non-white racialised ethnicities and identities have been long constructed in Australia (Hage, 1998). Yet Linh was eager to explore class as a potent theme in her life, as she observed the effects that class had wielded on her family’s migration story.

Narrating an intergenerational self proved vital for Linh as it enabled her to grasp how some class capitals from her family had transferred to Australia and been reproduced as advantages that came to aid their class mobility. This was made possible under conditions in Australia that recognised her father’s previously acquired and encultured skills and dispositions as assets (Bourdieu, 1989). This included her father’s strong English language skills, his specific professional and managerial capabilities and his learnt ability to tolerate Western food. But a language of class also made it possible to tell a different story of class for Linh’s mother in her move to Australia. Linh explained that while her father had hailed from a well-off military family in Vietnam, Linh’s mother’s family had been very poor; her mother had escaped entrenched poverty and won scholarships to support her university education in engineering, including winning a university medal. In Australia, Linh’s mother was unable to have these qualifications recognised. With limited English, and being the primary carer of two small children, Linh’s mother was also unable to retrain in another white-collar profession. Instead, she became a ‘garment worker’, working from the family home. Linh explained her mum started out in ‘garbage working conditions’ alongside ‘all these like Vietnamese garment workers’ in Melbourne, ‘making t-shirts for 50 cents each’. As authors Emma Do and Kim Lam explain, Vietnamese garment workers in 1980s and 1990s Australia were mostly women who were ‘paid by the piece’. They were exploited because of their language skills and their place in the labour market: racialised and feminised outworkers fell outside of the protections afforded to waged workers (Do and Lam, 2021: 25).

Eventually, like other migrants seeking to escape exploitative working conditions (Idriss, 2018), Linh’s mother started her own business, which she also ran from their family home. After Linh’s dad completed studies at night time, the family relocated to Canberra, where he worked a full-time, permanent IT job. They bought a house in a ‘middle-class’ suburb where Linh’s mum ‘kept working as a seamstress for other people’. Linh described this entrepreneurship as her mother’s ‘whole life’. She told us her mother was very proud of her work as a small business owner, and cultivated an enormous amount of experience and expertise throughout her career, finding independence and building self-esteem, even if it wasn’t the career she had envisioned for herself (see e.g. Collins et al., 1995). And like Manisha, Linh is also keenly aware of the physical toll of the work that her mother has done ‘for years and years’, and still does in her 60s.

Linh’s family migration experience clearly pivots around her family’s displacement, the legacies of her family’s and her parents’ class positions, and the forces of race and gender in the transmission and transformation of class capital and identity in settler Australia. Linh’s story makes acutely clear how Australia’s post-war racialised class structure demarcated the opportunities afforded her antecedents. Narrating an intergenerational self in her class-origin identity, we argue, reflected efforts to remember and honour her family’s and especially her mother’s struggles within her own narratives of class immobility. And, as seen above in the examples of Manisha and Claire, helps us comprehend how interviewees from migrant backgrounds grappled with class misrecognition, contradiction and opportunity that migration and racialisation had created within her family and for herself, again highlighting the significance of inheritance over class misidentification.

Conclusion

The concept of the ‘intergenerational self’ is highly productive for understanding how and why middle-class professionals in the United Kingdom downplay their class origin in a context that valorises ideals of meritocracy. In this article we have argued that the ‘intergenerational self’ is also highly generative when deployed in the context of migration, but for a very different purpose. Drawing on our research into cross-class relationships in Australia, we have argued that intergenerational recognitions were of heightened importance in relationships where one or both partners were from migrant or transnationally mobile families. In these cases, ‘incorrect’ answers about class identification were not always a case of self-stylisation or active and ultimately self-serving obfuscation of one’s class advantages, but could reflect a concerted attempt to represent and understand a complex trajectory of class that encompassed transnational family histories. Indeed we have argued that this concept is particularly important in mobility contexts given the varying ways that class is configured in complex ways in different nation states. However, this also requires that scholars bring to their analysis a critical understanding of how class is racialised in relation to specific migration trajectories within national and regional contexts, something not tackled by Friedman et al. We have expanded here on a key history of class theorising that insists racism and racialisation shape processes of class identification.

The life stories of Manisha, Claire and Linh have pivoted 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. Manisha’s narration of an intergenerational self made explicit that her deeply felt identification as ‘working class’ was a result of her family’s migration experience. Rather than a means through which to deflect class privilege, we perceive that Manisha’s intergenerational accounting of her classed self represents a reckoning with the complexity and contradictions of her family’s shifting class location across space and time (Parreñas, 2001). Claire’s class narrative hinged on her family’s extended working-class lives in Wales that had served as important anchors of kin and place in her multigenerational family legacies. Claire too drew significantly on an evaluative perspective of her own personal history as well as how this history fit into larger cultural and historical frameworks. In her case, as for Friedman et al., this wider context has become one in which deflecting or obscuring one’s class-origin carries currency within specific industries that rely heavily on class advantage to succeed. However, while we acknowledge such contradictions of class identification, our emphasis throughout has been on the subjective and affective inheritances of family migration through which our interviewees laboured to interpret and describe to us their class circumstances. Finally, Linh’s migration story drove home the ways that Australia’s post-war racialised class structure delimited the opportunities of some participants’ forebears, as Linh recalled, as she honoured her parents’ struggles within their own narratives of class identification and class mobility. In sum, we have made clear how the ‘intergenerational self’ helps us understand the way such research participants grappled with the class contradictions, misrecognition and opportunities that migration and racialisation had afforded, highlighting the significance of familial class legacies. We argue this concept may enable researchers to better understand participants’ attempts to deploy their class-origin identity to narrate a meaningful and coherent story about their family’s social and spatial trajectory across time and place.