The other Eurostars: lifestyle migration, class and race among vocationally trained Italians
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 StudiesVolume
49Issue
1Pages
332-349Publisher
Taylor & FrancisVersion
- AM (Accepted Manuscript)
Rights holder
© Taylor & FrancisPublisher 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
2021-03-29Publication date
2021-04-07Copyright date
2021ISSN
1369-183XeISSN
1469-9451Publisher version
Language
- en