Aspirational Geographies
Intergenerational Dynamics of (Im)mobility Among Youth with Bangladeshi Origins in Rome
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Abstract
In this article, I deal with young people with Bangladeshi origins who want to remain in Rome in spite of a massive onward migration toward the United Kingdom that involved most of their friends. Based on ethnographic interviews, I show how the same aspirations of social mobility that their parents and many of their peers fulfilled thanks to spatial mobility are now being pursued by these youth through sedentarization processes. Their counternarratives of mobility debunk a dreamlike imaginary of faraway places, shedding light on the role played by structures of opportunities and social positionalities in interconnecting spatial and social (im)mobility, and in creating alternative aspirational geographies, that is, spatial imaginaries that incorporate the opportunities and the desires that people associate with different places.
Contributor Notes
Andrea Priori is an anthropologist who holds an “MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowships Global” from the European Union at Roma Tre University and the University of Lausanne. Her main interests include (im)mobilities, transnational migrations, migrant organizations, Islam, secularism, and masculinities. She has been studying Bangladeshi migrations for eighteen years and published the monograph Romer probashira in 2012 (Meti Edizioni). She also coedited journal special issues and published various book chapters and peer reviewed articles in national and international journals. She is an active member of the Bangladesh Studies Network and collaborated with the Centre for Gender Studies of Karlstad University, Sweden, and with the Department of Social and Cultural Sciences of the Fulda University, Germany.” Email: andrea.priori@uniroma3.it