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The other Eurostars: lifestyle migration, class and race among vocationally trained Italians

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posted on 2023-01-16, 10:07 authored by Simone VarrialeSimone Varriale

This article investigates the aspirations for adventure, cosmopolitanism and self-exploration among non-graduate EU migrants from working- and lower-middle-class backgrounds. Drawing on interviews with Italians who moved to England after the 2008 economic crisis, and focusing on participants with vocational school diplomas, the article explores participants’ lifestyle imaginaries, how these contextualise participants’ economic concerns, and how they are negotiated in classed, racialised and gendered migrations. The findings reveal that these ‘other Eurostars’ come from class fractions endowed with relative, but unequally distributed, economic security and lower institutionalised cultural capital. This has a significant bearing on their motivations and experiences of migration, but without reducing them to mere economic instrumentalism. Indeed, participants approach employment as a means of self-realisation and status distinction, following aspirations that the extant literature ascribes to graduate migrants. The article contributes to lifestyle migration and intra-EU migration studies by revealing the centrality of non-economic motivations among less privileged EU migrants and showing that individualisation, as a late-modern project, is central to their migrations, but that it takes classed, racialised and gendered forms.

Funding

Leverhulme Trust (UK) under a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship (2015–18)

History

School

  • Social Sciences and Humanities

Department

  • Criminology, Sociology and Social Policy

Published in

Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies

Volume

49

Issue

1

Pages

332-349

Publisher

Taylor & Francis

Version

  • AM (Accepted Manuscript)

Rights holder

© Taylor & Francis

Publisher statement

This is an Accepted Manuscript version of the following article, accepted for publication in Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies. Simone Varriale (2023) The other Eurostars: lifestyle migration, class and race among vocationally trained Italians, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 49:1, 332-349, DOI: 10.1080/1369183X.2021.1911632. It is deposited under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Acceptance date

2021-03-29

Publication date

2021-04-07

Copyright date

2021

ISSN

1369-183X

eISSN

1469-9451

Language

  • en

Depositor

Dr Simone Varriale. Deposit date: 13 January 2023

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