Abstract
This article demonstrates how public dialogue on the term ‘second/third-generation migrant’, currently used within European Union integration policies, create barriers to transcultural dialogue and democratic participation within Europe. Drawing on 75 semi-structured interviews within Dublin, Düsseldorf, Glasgow, London and Stockholm, our dialogical analysis shows how public dialogue articulates three dimensions of developmental psychology foregrounding the figure of a generational migrant with cognitive, moral and seemingly pathological dimensions. We argue that the ordinal logic implied in the concept of the imagined generational migrant reflects not only a desire to control but crucially an absence of a desire to meet the other as coeval. Understanding this desire to control requires reorienting social representations theory from an epistemic subject engaged in perspective-taking, sharing and resisting cultural knowledge towards an ontological subject with imaginative impulses, and novelistic projections about the generational migrant's cultural being. As the term ‘third-generation migrant’ comes into use such integration logic sustains boundaries between those marked as having a migrant background and those unmarked. We propose that a focus on the desire to control is central to cultural psychology’s capacity to interrogate the parameters of public dialogue as well as policy on migration and integration within the European public sphere.
Introduction
JS: I am a part of myself (laughing) and I’m included in the society but not integrated.
KM: What does that mean?
JS: I’m a part of the society in those terms that I have work I can talk for myself. I can organise to get those goals I want to get but I’m not anyway part of the society so I don’t, I don’t er talking about terms like integration. Because integration I think is the two parts are going to meet and the society is not ever going to meet you. So I think it’s ok they accept me for what I am so I am included because the integration is never going to be.
JS, in the comment above, reflects on why he believes integration, as a coming together of himself, (as a member of the Roma), and (Swedish) society ‘is never going to be’. Indeed, from JS’s perspective, there appears to be a reluctance to meet the ‘migrant’ 1 . We start our article with JS’s conviction that ‘integration is never going to be’ to foreground the meaning of transcultural dialogue beyond perspective taking and inclusion to the two central preoccupations of this article - desire to meet and - desire to control. As JS explains, ‘The society is not ever going to meet you’.
The child or grandchild of a person who moves country, into and within Europe is often referred to within integration policies and public discourse as a ‘second’ or ‘third-generation im/migrant’ despite their own non-mobility. What cultural politics are created by this temporal logic, this insistent lineage? This article reports on a study which brought citizens into dialogue with such categories inherent to European integration policies.
By exploring public sense-making on the categories second/third-generation migrant, we investigate how such categories create barriers to transcultural dialogue, participation and belonging within the European public sphere. The dialogical analysis below articulates the figure of a generational migrant and the cultural lay psychologies that underpin it. These lay psychologies imaginatively project a subjective, emotional and cognitive generational development onto the migrant.
The analysis equally interrogates social representations theory (Moscovici, 1974, 1988), particularly its focus on perspective-taking. Our central theoretical argument is that intercultural encounters rest not only on shared, transmitted and resisted representational cultural knowledge but also on an implicit deeply-rooted ontology of a generational migrant subject, across time. Revealing this figure contributes to a broader question being discussed within cultural psychology relating temporal considerations (Marková, 2003) specifically the question ‘How can we understand better temporality in culture and cultural temporality?’ (Glăveanu & Wagoner, 2015, p. 435).
European integration policy, further detailed below, is driven, we suggest by a desire to control. ‘Desire to control’ refers to the proposition that the energies within governments are motivated towards reproduction of existing cultural orders, which some people to be marked and others unmarked (Doty, 2003, p. 10). Doty is unapologetic about connecting the phenomenon of desire to the state and rejects attempts to operationalise ‘desire’ arguing instead for desire as containing multiplicities and energies. As our analysis articulates below, these desires coalesce around social protectionism and a need to create orderings. A desire for control by the state creates a tension with a desire to meet.
From Acculturation Approaches to Dialogical Approaches to Integration
Psychology investigations into our desire to meet can be best understood within acculturation studies, usually starting from Berry’s four acculturation strategies (Berry, 1997). This theory holds together migration with culture, propose that incoming migrants balance contact with the majority culture against maintaining the culture of their origins, integration occurs when they are kept in balance. However, individuals may well assimilate entirely, rejecting their original cultures, or reject the majority culture and remain separate. Finally, in some circumstance, individuals report a lack of contact with both their own and their host culture – marginalisation.
Within cultural psychology, dialogical-social representations approaches have critiqued acculturation theory and increasingly the on-going conflation of migration with culture (Mahendran, 2025). Emphasizing the individual’s capacity to work with shared knowledge, seeking to transform social representations or tactically anticipating another’s I-position (Andreouli, 2013; Deaux, 2006; Howarth et al., 2014; Kadianaki & Gillespie, 2015; Marková, 2003, 2008). Crucially, we can be integrated in one I-position and marginalised in another (Bhatia, 2002).
Significantly, acculturation studies which begin to explore what we term desire to meet against our perception of the other’s desire to meet, observe a ‘discrepancy of perceptions’ where Turkish and Moroccan migrants said they would favour integration when presented with the four strategies within a fictitious newspaper article, whereas Dutch people favoured assimilation. Yet the Dutch participants believed both Moroccans and Turkish people to favour separation (Van Oudenhoven, et al., 1998).
Desire to Meet and the Epistemic Self
Desire to meet the others’ perspective is vague and difficult to pin down. Perhaps for this reason, there is a gap in current conceptualisation of transcultural dialogue. Following from the approaches taken by Habermas through to current social representational accounts conceptual work around epistemology or theory of knowledge in the public sphere is highly sophisticated. We know that the on-going construction of knowledge is perspectival (Gillespie & Cornish, 2010; Kadianaki & Gillespie, 2015), that different systems of knowledge are artificially valued over others, such as the scientific over the literary (Jovchelovitch, 2007), that the perspective one takes depends on one’s ‘I-position’ (Hermans, 2001) and/or the ‘object’ in a dialogical triad of ‘alter’, ‘ego’, ‘object’ (Marková, 2003, 2023).
Our specific research questions are (i) what sense-making occurs when participants are presented with the policy and public discourse terms – second second/third-generation migrant, (ii) what implications does this have in terms of blockages to transcultural encounters and participation in the public sphere.
How people respond to these two questions potentially uncovers a distinction between an epistemic subject and an ontological subject. By talking about this distinction we are referring to the ways in which individuals engaged in a dialogue, imagine the subjective, emotional and cognitive development of the other. The idea of staged-development is already implicit in the terms second/third-generation and in our analysis, we locate this development as being central to the framing of the migrant implicit ontology as a generational migrant who through the generations develops towards the sensibilities of the host society. The analysis presented below draws on both Kohlberg’s moral development and Piaget’s model of cognitive development as analogous to this lay developmetal psychology by employing Bandlemundi’s approach to development which reintereprets these stages as about genres of crises and emergence.
Naturally, today both are heavily critiqued. Bandlamundi shows how the use of development genres can benefit from Bakhtin’s sense of time-space (chronotope). Theoretically, Bandlamundi (1999, 2015) established the precedent of metaphorically interpreting ‘stage-models’ as genres, even though they are not dialogic from within their own paradigm. She argues that Piaget employs the same genre as a ‘novelistic emergence’ i.e. that the genre emphasizes a developmental process. Where through various crises (assimilation and accommodation) the Piagetian subject emerges from relative ignorance to a higher plane of reasoning. This is in contrast to genres ‘without emergence’ i.e. without development. Where, despite crises, the subject does not change (e.g. in Freudian models, a character can become ‘fixated’ at a particular developmental level).
Drawing on Bakhtin (1990) and his insistence that knowledge is intertwined with eros or desire, we ask what privileging ontology can add, conceptually? By using the term ‘desire’ we foreground this ontological dimension, desire is not a question of what we know about the other but our attraction and imaginative projections towards the other. This subtly shifts communication away from the ideal speech communication proposed by Habermas towards the ‘ideal’, ‘answerable’ other proposed by Bakhtin.
Knowledge and Its Blockages
The epistemological concern with knowledge in the public sphere gets us quite far in terms of understanding the blockages that prevent the perspective of another being attended to in the public sphere. The influence of Habermas is profound here (e.g. Dobson, 2014; Jovchelovitch, 2007; Nielsen, 2002). Habermas refers to ‘systematically distorted communication’ within the public sphere (Habermas, 1968, p.288). For example, myths, powerful interests, and the pathology of social institutions distort the possibilities for genuine understanding and communication in the public sphere (Gross, 2006).
A parallel reading of this ‘distortion’ is the concept of ‘semantic barriers’ which Moscovici (1974) identifies and Gillespie (2008) elaborates on. The premise of these ‘semantic barriers’ is that dialogic relations between different social representations are potentially inhibited by systematic communicative distortion. For example ‘rigid oppositions’ between ‘communism’ and ‘psychoanalysis’ entailed either total support or total rejection (Gillespie, 2008). Crucially, such relations are between ‘social representations’ rather than people, because, in keeping with the privileging of epistemology, it is the ways in which knowledge is socially represented through communication that forms the analytic interest here. Gillespie when discussing ‘alternative representations’ is quite clear on this: Alternative representations are not representations of others, but the ideas which are attributed to real or imagined others. Of course there is a close relation between how we represent others and the ideas we attribute to them, but the focus of the concept of alternative representations is on the latter (Gillespie, 2008, p.341)
In this account of alternative representations, the epistemological framework is one where knowledge has different sides to it that are embodied in ‘real or imagined others’. These ‘others’ are derivative, in ontological terms, from this feature of knowledge as fractured across perspectives. In the next section, we will contrast this with a lay psychology of others who develop their perspective across time.
For now, however, it is worth noting that there are many other ‘semantic barriers’ to communication such as ‘prohibited thoughts’ and ‘stigma’ but also as Gillespie argues, the possibility of ‘semantic promoters’ such as irony and humour exist. Though humour can of course also be used as a barrier. We don’t have the space to get into this now but suffice is to say that we are building a picture of reasons why knowledge goes beyond sets of logical relations to sets of dialogical relations – where knowledge encounters barriers or can flow according to the form of its social representation in particular perspectives rather than, for instance, the cognitive capacity to understand. Instead of ‘cognitive capacity’, this work brings us to ‘cognitive polyphasia’ (Marková, 2003) or an understanding of the mind as an arena for different currents of representations and alternative representations. The version of the subject which follows on from this is profoundly epistemic insofar as the perspectival quality of knowledge is re-capitulated in an understanding of the self as juggling different perspectives.
This epistemic subject is re-capitulated time and again in dialogical psychology whether through the concept of alter-ego-object relations (Marková, 2003) (where knowledge of the ‘object’ is dialogically constructed) or through the ‘dialogical self’ (e.g. Hermans, 2001; Hermans & Dimaggio, 2007) where our knowledge of the social world emerges from the perspective or position which dominates. This perspective may emerge from different positions jostling within a ‘society of mind’ but it is the perspective on knowledge that counts.
Privileging the Ontological Self
What happens if we shift the emphasis away from the dialogical self as a perspective-taker (epistemic self) to looking at the dialogical self as a ‘form-shaper’ of the other-to use Bakhtin’s (1990) terminology- or more simply-one who actively creates the subjectivity/lay-psychology of the ‘migratory’ subject through the generations (ontological self). We are interested in how such a creation uses the material of stage-models within developmental psychology to theorise the developing ‘being’ of citizens marked by a migrant background. Of course, this involves epistemology as well, in the sense that knowledge of the imagined migratory subject and how we can get to know the migratory subject is central to the dialogue. However, we are interested in how ‘subjectivity’ is imagined (Nielsen, 2002) without any marker of race, gender, class that might normally orientate understandings of an Other.
Nielsen (2002) puts this well when talking about Eros: Bakhtin asks: How should I act, not because of rules or the expectation of a duty founded in my own subjectivity, but from my own will, my own striving; not then because of an apriori interest that orients my actions but rather: how should I act given the imaginary but not fictional, subjectivity of another who can answer me back? (Nielsen, 2002, p.118, italics’ Nielsen’s).
What Nielsen means by this, is that knowledge is not just instrumental or even potentially rational but is instead aesthetic, based on imaginative projection. This approach to dialogue resonates with Hermans (2001) Marková (2003) and Gillespie (2008) but offers a different perspective on dialogue as related ontological. To return to the public sphere, it offers a ‘thickening’ of the relationship between ethnos and demos (Nielsen, 2002). We understand ethnos as cultural being and demos as democratic capacity and rights. What Nielsen means by this relationship, is that knowledge is not based on legal rights to communicate as citizens (demos) but that there is a concurrent relationship with the particularity of the cultural ‘being’ in dialogue that is both aesthetic (or form-shaping) and ethical or answerable. This relates then to both the desire to meet and the desire to control. In Bakhtin’s (1990) terms, in communication, the ‘soul’ is a gift bestowed on the other.
We find this reading of the ‘soul’ impossibly idealistic – it is often not a gift or if it is, it can be an unwanted gift or a kitsch gift but we are drawn to the framework nonetheless as it provides a powerful steer towards looking at yet another layer of the dialogue – the form-shaping/answerable layer. In other words, Bakhtin views communication as an act of consummation (or completing being) as much as understanding.
European Integration Policy and the Desire to Control
Within the public sphere the European Union’s preoccupation with integration strategies finds expression in the European’s Unions ‘Common Basic Principles of Migrant Integration’ which state that ‘integration is ‘a dynamic two-way process of mutual accommodation for migrants and residents alike’ (Council of the European Union, 2004, p.17). Despite decades of academic-policy dialogue, what is meant by integration remains contested. In line with the acculturation studies discussed above, specific policies focus mainly on the economic and cultural competencies of migrants themselves. This integration logic assumes that human mobility needs to be managed to ensure social cohesion and stability. The categories second/third generation migrant are not used within settlement countries such as Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the US who use hyphenated identities, bridging ethnicity and country of birth. This is, in part, because the main policy frame in such contexts is multiculturalism. Within European countries disenchantment with multiculturalism has led to the rising fortunes of integration. Resisting an alternative view based on multiculturalism, convivial disintegration or superdiversity (Mahendran et al., 2015; Meissner & Vertovec, 2015; Meissner, 2018).
Paradoxically the categories second/third generation are a key integration metric for the European Commission’s for example “Certain migrants have specific requirements and priorities which should be taken into account within overall integration strategies. This is the case with refugees, persons enjoying international protection, women and young second or third-generation migrants” (Point 21. EC (2007) summary of COM (2003) 336)
Harmonisation at the time of fieldwork, particularly Eurostat’s co-ordinated collection of EU indicators of integration use the term ‘second-generation migrant’ for the collection of data on the ‘immediate descendants of migrants’ (Eurostat, 2011). Currently, Eurostat favours the term of ‘migrant background’ within policy discourse however, such a term simply makes opaque the language of the generational migrant but does not progress beyond it to signal co-eval existence.
Method
Engaging Participants in Dialogical Interviews
The age ranged from 18 to 74 with an equal number of men and women and migrants and non-migrant. Participants had varying degrees of educational backgrounds and were in a variety of occupations including people who were unemployed. Semi-structured digitally recorded interviews were carried out in face-to-face in 2012/2013 (N = 76). Range = 45 to 128 minutes, (mean = 88). Interviews in Dublin, Düsseldorf, Glasgow and London were conducted in English, and in Gothenburg in English and Swedish. Swedish interviews were translated into English and all analysis was conducted in English. An equal number of migrants (understood as crossing a state border) and non-migrant participated however it is important to note in order to move beyond the binary of migrant/non-migrant all participants were purposive sampled along a Migration-Mobility Continuum. This analytical lens understands mobility as continuous, from the generationally non-mobile -position 1, to those who have moved several times and intend to move again -position 10 (Mahendran, 2013, 2017).
The rationale for the two-part interview schedule was to move from open questions which revealed participant’s own categories of integration and belonging towards closed questions which brought participants into dialogue with the categories used within European Union integration policies. Part One began with the open sentence-completion question ‘I am a part of’, then gauged participant’s degree of mobility and understanding of concepts such as ‘integration’ and ‘citizenship’. Part Two used EU materials as stimulus materials for example the first principle of the Common Basic Principles referred to earlier. The analysis below developed in principally in response to one question ‘Sometimes people talk about second-generation migrant and third-generation migrant, what do these terms mean to you?’. This dialogical design brings participant into critical dialogue with the EU’s ideals and policies promoting the adoption of an active I-citizen position in agreement or disagreement with such ideals (Mahendran, Jackson, & Kapoor, 2015). At a more ontological level, it also acts to directly address the transcultural blockages, perhaps beyond the semantic, that occur and the role being played by institutional categories such as second-generation migrant/third-generation-migrants
Since conducting the fieldwork, the UK has left the EU, albeit with Scotland seeking to resist that process. However, we would propose that the imagined generational development outlined below continues both in the UK and within the European Union.
Steps in Dialogical Genre Analysis
The analysis employed three steps (Sullivan, 2011). First, a ‘genre’ is identified through reading and re-reading the ‘whole’ of the text for meaning (Bakhtin, 2010). Here the term genre refers to a way of seeing and conceptualising the world (Bandlamundi, 1999). Within the approach proposed by Sullivan, connotations of the genre are then deepened and clarified through a turn to theory. In this case of second/third generation migrants the elaboration alighted on the emergence genre of stage-models of childhood development. The underlying theme relates to the overall critical framing of the analysis - that of a desire to meet/desire to control.
Second, we deepen this emergence genre using Kohlberg’s ‘moral stages’ of development. Finally, we found that these stage-models intertwined with a genre without emergence where the migratory subject is seen to not entirely develop and so experiences incomplete integration (e.g. through homesickness, ‘fixation’ on the past, or leading a double life).
After identifying these genres, the third step returns these genres to the voices of the interview participants putting their comments into dialogical contact with one another within the text itself using ‘created dialogues’ (Sullivan, 2011). Here quotations from participants that exemplify our developing analysis are ‘answered’ with the actual words of other participants – via agreement and disagreement. To make the dialogue flow, we add in imagined ‘continuations’ in brackets (e.g. ‘I agree and…’).
Analysis: Imagined Development of the Migrant Subject Through the Generations
The imagined development of the migrant subject, foregrounding three interchangeable psychological dimensions, cognitive, moral and pathological which together act to block the desire to meet and further strengthen processes of control. The order we have chosen to present these dialogues aims to illustrate the ‘thickening’ of the migratory subject through the generations iteratively created from a lay psychology of cognitive deficits to moral deficits through to a more romantic impenetrable core of irrational thoughts and feelings.
The participants above articulate a highly novelistic emergent genre as a lay recapitulation of Piagetian integration stages (Bandlamundi, 1999). There are different developmental stages and cathartic changes between the generations, with the future, ‘final stage’ of the ‘integrated migrant’. From the perspective of time-space (chronotope) configuration, this means that different life experiences such as chance encounters or conversion experiences are peripheral to the genre. Instead, the life-cycle itself follows a path where development is driven by a future state (enlightenment). At stage one, the ‘sensori-motor’ stage, the ‘first generation’ of migrants is ‘born’ into the new country and so “they don’t know anything” (BQ), including how to deal with cultural differences. According to HW, they even forget where they come from. So this first generation, speaking in generalisations, is imagined as an amnesiac, infant-like subject. Although they don’t literally have sensori-motor abilities, they can only use their old values (or apriori schema) to make sense of things and ‘measure’ things around them.
Participants articulate a developmental jump in the second stage (the second generation). ‘Assimilation’ (or integration) and ‘accommodation’ (of old traditions) leads to a kind of ‘re-birth’ of the migratory subject. The second generation are more ‘intellectually’ curious, according to BD. With this, however, comes the complication of having a relationship with a country in which they never lived (LX). So, ‘the imagined migratory subject’, at this second stage, can deal with the concrete objects around them or their new milieu; getting the ‘blend of old and new’ but finds it difficult to abstract to having a relationship with a ‘birth’ country that they have never been in. In this sense, the imagined ‘ migratory subject’ at this stage appears to re-capitulate the ‘concrete’ operational stage.
There is little data on the ‘third generation’., Yet a curious insight is provided by LV. According to LV, in the third stage, they become ‘much more relaxed’. Here again, the stage model of progressive psychological improvement is re-capitulated but not in the sense of ‘formal operations’ but in a more Freudian, psycho-sexual sense of losing fixations (on old traditions and values) and tensions to become more relaxed. This is an emotional break-through in the development of the imagined migratory subject. Yet it also reveals a meta-narrative of absence of desire to meet the migrant on their own terms.
The extent to which this is framed within a desire to control is illustrated, in so far as there is very little that our participants say about the generational psychology of the ‘host’ country, with the exception of BQ who suggests that in Germany, the older generation are more polite and happy in contrast to the younger generation who are unfriendly and aggressive.
This ‘novelistic emergence’ of stages of cognitive development, however, is only the first prong in a triangle of dimensions that emerge in the collective understanding of the subjectivity of the imagined migratory subject occurring in Europe. The second is their imagined morality. Here, we find a more horizontal fracturing of the subject across different kinds of migrant, who become classed according to their imagined morality. Created dialogue two captures this:
We constructed the dialogue above around the emergence genre as following Kohlberg’s ‘six stages of moral development’. Created Dialogue two serves to co-author the ‘imagined migratory subject’ on a moral continuum, delineates different ethnic groups. This meta-narrative reveals a desire to control the participation of such groups in the public sphere.
This relates to our theoretical synthesis introduced earlier of there being a developmental processes ascribed to the ‘other’ which intertwines with migrants’ ethnos or the way they think and act in the world (supposedly). Our point is that these imagined development stages reveal a lack of desire to meet and suggest a desire to control. Critically, this emphasis on control, impacts the ability of citizens, marked as having a migrant background, to participate in the public sphere as citizens – their demos, as democratic capacity. ‘ON’ makes the point at the beginning of this created dialogue that the West Indian culture with their ‘sparkle’ are ‘very good in the caring professions’ but that the Somalians and Mexicans ‘seem to wreck the place’. Another way of putting this is to say that the Somalians and Mexicans are constructed as being at a ‘pre-conventional’ stage of moral development (stage one, level one). The same as children who have not internalised the rules of right and wrong and are selfishly ‘wrecking the place’. The West Indians, in their obedience to social norms such as being good nurses, sparkly and filling a caring social role, have reached level two – ‘conventional morality’, in this genre (stage three–interpersonal accord and conformity). This is a stage also reached by the second-generation Iranians, under a reading of JJ’s response, insofar as they fulfil good, or at least valued social roles – doctors and lawyers. Yet, our current interview data does not show that they have reached stage four – of Kohlberg’s stages - engaging in their role for societal order.
One magic ingredient that appears, in this emergent genre, as moving the migrants through these stages of moral development, is education. Education’ allows the Iranians, West Indians and those in former Balkan states to ‘integrate’ or to ‘assimilate’; to perform valued social roles and to be co-authored as being of value. It is the lack of ‘education’ that keeps the Somalians and Mexicans at a lower level of moral development; of less value and less integrated – stuck in the pre-conventional, child-like stage of morality.
RV begins to sketch a more ‘practical’ education of citizenship, based on post-conventionality morality – ‘and see because I smiled, she gave me the most lovely smile…you’ve got to make an effort to make them feel they’re just the same as us’. In this story, the black woman changes metamorphically from being ‘an oddball’ to being someone who can give the ‘most lovely smile’. To suspend and ignore possible traces of condescension (feeling sorry for) and prejudice in this tale (‘they cannae help but look different’; she looked like an ‘oddball’), RV demonstrates a desire to meet, in articulating something like “universal human rights” ’ of post-conventional morality (“we have to feel the same”) and there is an abstract principle that suggests “we ought to make an effort with each other”. This is despite the fact that there is no evidence that the woman in question was even a migrant or an outsider to citizenship to begin with. It is telling, in this tale, however, that the woman is not positioned as being anywhere on the moral continuum, but is instead only the subject of RV’s post-conventional morality teaching. What is being authored here, is not only the supposed feeling of the imagined migratory subject (feeling the same as ‘us’) but a desire to control in the form of the education of the migratory subject into a post-conventional morality (“we make an effort to follow the abstract principle of social justice and equality across differences”).
Overall, what can we say about this genre – of moral development and stages of improvement across different migrant groups? Of course, there are stereotypes present in these extracts – which attempt to give a stable form to the ‘imagined migratory subject’, but there is also surprising flexibility, as long as the specific ethnic migrant group are perceived to be sharing the same ‘values’ as this European group – particularly the value of education. Those groups who do not have access to the same education are positioned as morally and cognitively inferior.
In this regard, the ‘novelistic emergence’ genre in this lay psychology has a slightly different chronotope to the previous one. Development does not just progress as a natural state. Instead, the inner psychological desires of migrants (e.g. the willingness to meet, integrate and educate) is presumed to influence their imagined rate of development and critically their legitimation in the public sphere.
A focus on ‘inner desire’ brings us on to the final dimension– the double life of the imagined migratory subject. Whereas morality was very clearly fractured along named migrant ethnic groups, this double-life is ontological is spoken of in a more abstract way – as a general part of their being conflicts within participation in the public sphere (Bassra, 2024).
KX refers to second generation migrants leading ‘two lives’ and this is echoed by others in this created dialogue. The ‘emergence genre intertwines with the genre of ‘without emergence’ non-development. ‘Emergence’ is a fundamental change of character that leads to ‘integration’, i.e. by going through the stages through generations. ‘Without emergence’ on the other hand means that even though they go through the stages, their fundamental character has not changed. This double life involves a similar developmental chronotope of the previous two genres (cognitive and moral stages) insofar as the splitting of life into a ‘double life’, and not belonging, can dissipate over time as some kind of lay conception of ‘maturation’. Yet there is an emotional and political strand to this homesickness that means it does more than just freeze development but remains as a potential complication/pathologisation of the present time and space. Emotionally, XR tells us that she used to feel xenitya (a Greek term for the condition of being a foreigner/outsider) but no longer does. There also seems to be some degree of homesickness to XR interpretation (“I started missing…”) of xenitya. Then, however, the routines of ‘integration begin’ and she no longer feels this. Xenitya is an emotional ‘journey’ rather than an intergenerational journey. As an emotion, one can ‘feel sorry’ for the imagined migratory subject; feel sorry for their imagined/real homesickness and double-lives, even if this is a journey that will be ‘cured’ by the passing of time such that undergoes emotional upheavals before entering the demos fully and connecting with the ethnos. It is interesting to note this sympathetic move, which may appear as a desire to meet, remains a desire to control, as it assumed that integration into the host country is the ideal, rather than enjoying a hybrid space (Bassra, 2024), or the best of two societies.
There is a second, more political strand however in created dialogue three, which doesn’t seem to link entry to the demos and ethnos to the emotional adventures of the imagined migratory subject. Particularly in the case of identity splitting (the ontological self being split in two, leading a double life), ML points to the imagined disabling effect of rhetorically ‘pointing out’ the sickness (the split identity) to the migrant. He uses the example of the footballer ‘Özil ’, who at the time of the interview played for Germany and has a Turkish background. ‘They’ (the media? football fans?), in their desire to control, are quick to point out this aspect of Özil, which ‘doesn’t allow ‘them’ (presumable descendants of migrants) to become ‘genuine’.
So, although we do not know what kind of relationship Özil has with Turkey and Germany, ML suggests that he is co-authored as being less than genuine (a false being) by the act of pointing out his heritage. In this cultural-temporal logic, authorship of migratory inauthenticity (the masquerading as genuine) preventing a real, genuine German to exist is a ‘quality’ that passes from the first generation of migrant to the next generation as a form of immutable transmission. In other words, in this political reading of the stubborn inauthenticity of being a migrant, there is a more fixed form not being genuine that relates to the desire to control and therefore lies outside of the control of the migrant; outside of their emotions or their desire. There appears to be no desire to meet. For Özil and others like him, it is constructed as a barrier to connecting with the German ethnos (hampered by this othering) and of entering the demos (his contributions to German national team will never be from within it).
Discussion – An Insistent Lineage
This article aims to answer two questions, what sense-making occurs when the terms second/third-generation migrant are used in the European public sphere. Crucially what blockages does this sense-making create for the necessary transcultural encounters to allow within the demos, the full democratic capacity of those who appear to have a migrant background. Our first proposal is where there is something of a gap, is in the ontology, or theory of the person, that intertwines with a theory of knowledge (epistemic self-other relations). For example, what are the perceived desires of the other to construct a shared understanding in the public sphere? What are our own desires to engage with this other? In other words, this sense-making needs to be understood as not only relating to semantic barriers (epistemic barriers) but also pervasive ontological barriers, this requires social representations approaches to extend into the ontological domain as a site of insistent blockages, operating via a compelling ordinal logic.
We contribute to this challenge by drawing attention to the importance of eros or desire (Nielsen, 2002) within transcultural encounters. Our second proposal therefore is that by focusing specifically on two desires - the desire to control and the lack of an authentic desire to meet, as features of the ethnos of those imagining the generational migrant subject. Those investigating within transcultural contexts can challenge existing limits their participation in the demos, and the extent of their democratic capacities by attending to these desires. This is the position taken by JS at the outset of this article, when he state “and the society is not ever going to meet you so I think It’s ok they accept me for what I am so I am included because the integration is never going to be”. It is never going to be as long as this ordinal logic of the imagined generational migrant evokes terms such as second/third generation migrant.
To address these challenges we propose that the cultural orderings and psychological evaluation that occurred in our study are reflective of tensions between a desire to control those marked as Other as well as an evaluation of the other’s desire to meet. Theoretically a focus on desire becomes possible through privileging ontology over epistemology in dialogue. Currently, our models of the dialogical self are largely derivative of the epistemological conundrum of how we understand another’s perspective from our own perspective. Hence, the emphasis on ‘I-positions’ (Hermans, 2001; Hermans & Dimaggio, 2007), ‘semantic barriers’ (Gillespie, 2008) and ‘cognitive polyphasia’ (Marková, 2008). There is an interesting dance, in these models, between public and private speech, disjointedness and conjointedness, and the capacity to change, but at root the self here is concerned primarily with understanding knowledge and its contradictions.
The developing line of inquiry into what are termed meta-representations begins this process, but what is crucial to belonging and yet not present in such accounts, however, is the much more ineffable sense of mutuality and coeval existence - a desire to meet the other. Prioritising the ontological means to examine the imaginative acts of imputing a subjectivity to whom we speak – that is, what kind of character do they have, what is their cognitive-moral trajectory, what are their vulnerabilities and where do their differences lie, in their very cultural being. This all sounds very transcendental but here we have tried to materialise it as three dimensions which resemble formal psychological stage models of development and pathology and which follow distinct genres (‘emergence’ and ‘without emergence’). For example the desire to control in the form of the education of the migratory subject into a post-conventional morality or the conceiving of the cultural existence of second-generation migrant and as the splitting of life into a ‘double life’, and not belonging, can dissipate over time (third or fourth generation) as process of ‘maturation’.
Understanding the perspective of the other, when one privileges ontology like this, is to simultaneously create the others’ or the generational migrants’ subjectivity. Risking ethnos and demos and their relationship disappearing from site. The other may be considered child-like in the present but with the potential to grow or as an invalid interlocutor in the present or as one who is only half present within a dialogue because they are leading two lives. The value use of the term second generation migrant is very much in debate within reflexive and critical migrant studies and as we have noted the governance arrangements between the UK and Europe are very much in flux. For example Woldu in her examinations of the challenges of being understood as second generation migrants with Eritrean and European identities, uses the term second-generation, not so as to reify the category, but as a strategic essentialism, explaining “The use of the term ‘second generation’ in this article is therefore not intended to reify fixed identity categories but rather to critically engage with the ways in which these individuals navigate their positionality (Woldu, 2025, p. 3).
We found no references to fourth-generation migrants in the political and public discourse in relation to integration debates at the time of our analysis but perhaps it is only a matter of time.
Whilst our dialogical capacity to create ontological projections on to the other is productive, the ways that this is occurring in relation to those categorised as having a migrant background creates barriers which are counter-productive to the integration principles of the European Union and its member-states. In conclusion we propose that within cultural psychology an orientation away from the epistemic subject engaged in knowing the other towards an ontological subject engaged in imaginative projections and desires towards meeting the other is central to advances in transcultural dialogue and the conditions of belonging.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank the individuals who participated in the Placing Ourselves dialogical interviews. We would also like to acknowledge the vital role of collaborative colleagues who led Placing Ourselves city-nodes - Caroline Howarth, Anubhuti Kapoor (London), Nicola Magnusson (Düsseldorf) and research associates Thomas Winman and Helen Arvidsson (Gothenburg). We also thank James Creswell, colleagues within SPRG within the Open University, the social psychology grouping at Bradford University and the three anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments on earlier drafts of this article.
Funding
Funding for the Placing Ourselves study, from which this analysis and article developed was funded by the Centre for Citizenship, Identities & Governance, The Open University.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.