The traditional, largely economic explanations of migration through “push-and-pull” factors have been widely criticized for being deterministic and generalized, and for failing to account for the personal aspirations of migrants.1 Alternatively, some authors regard personal aspirations as a lens through which to understand the interaction between structure and agency, and between mutually interconnected structural factors.2 Emphasizing the individual (as opposed to collective) desire for attaining a more or less specific goal (e.g. social upward mobility, or a “better life” in a more general sense), the notion of aspiration can serve as an analytical tool to understand the ways in which individuals make sense of migration. Aspiring to how life could be is intrinsically connected with mobility, because it relates to the complexities of being mobile in different ways. What is at stake here, in particular, is a better understanding of the spatial and the social dimensions of being or wanting to be mobile—a phenomenon that has been called “motility”—and the knowledge and skills that are actually required to become mobile.3 Aspiration thus relates to the ability to imagine, a decisive feature that Arjun Appadurai has called “capacity.”4
This special section draws on conceptual challenges by highlighting that these imaginaries are the products of processes of social negotiation. The articles that follow show that, on the one hand, imaginaries’ underlying aspirations are socially shared and transmitted—they influence why people aspire to migrate and where they aspire to migrate—and that, on the other hand, aspirations are constantly being shaped through the interactions between people constituting particular social spaces. Family relations, for example, shape individual family members’ aspirations to mobility and determine the ways in which they imagine how a particular aim can be pursued and imagine pursuing particular aims. While family networks provide social capital, they can also be sites of conflict and intergenerational drama. Commercial companies also facilitate movement, but in more regulated and institutionalized spaces and modalities. This latter phenomenon is demonstrated in Anna Spiegel's article, which analyzes the aspirations of managerial elites working for transnational companies that require their frequent relocation. Besides her effort to counter the tendency to ignore such privileged migrants in mainstream migration research, Spiegel highlights that aspirations are social imaginaries that need to be understood as embedded in complex cultural projects that are place- and power-sensitive.
Close-knit communities and families, however, also provide spaces and resources for negotiating the imaginaries that underlie individual aspirations. By conceptualizing family constellations as “regimes of belonging,” Joanna Pfaff-Czarnecka argues that students of “migrant background” are highly influenced by their parents’ visions. These visions remain embedded in familial settings, which often entail what she calls “intergenerational dramas.” Students’ decision-making thus is often determined by their commitment to their familial settings, even as they experience new forms of freedom and attachment at the university.5
Taking the case of young Bangladeshis living in Rome, whose upbringing has been infused with imaginaries of a better life through migration, Andrea Priori also focuses on the negotiations at the generational interface and elucidates how these processes shape how members of the younger generation envision their future. Based on long-term research in Sudan, Ulrike Schultz demonstrates that the continuous movement of her interlocutors across space is embedded in the decision-making processes of families whose members live dispersed and who constitute a dense network across translocal space. Her analysis of individual decisions to move also responds to the need to understand aspirations and their social embeddedness in relation to individual biographies.
The inquiries and findings of all the contributors to this special issue resonate with Kathrin Hörschelmann's claim to explore life transitions as nonlinear processes of becoming, including corresponding biographical ruptures and discontinuities.6 They further reveal how processes of negotiating the relationship between aspiration and mobility are also embedded in spatial configurations. They analyze not only how and why particular places are chosen by mobile subjects, but also how these places are connected with each other imaginatively and strategically. Migrants’ strategies quite often lead to the formation of well-considered routes but can sometimes result in rather arbitrary and spontaneous decisions in reaction to particular circumstances. While this dynamic is highlighted in Schultz's and Spiegel's analyses, Priori's article questions the “fetish” of mobility that once drove many scholars to portray mobility as an aspired commodity. He thus attempts to demystify habitual migration as the path to socioeconomic success by delineating that the Bangladeshi young people he interacted with consciously chose to stay in Rome to pursue higher education.
The articles included in this issue share a basis of extensive fieldwork. Predominantly ethnographic, they aim to reconstruct their interlocutors’ perspectives on their lives and their social world. While Spiegel, Pfaff-Czarnecka, and Priori focused on interview techniques that were triangulated with other strategies of data collection belonging to the ethnographic spectrum during a predefined period, Schultz's engagement was largely based on rather informal encounters with individuals she repeatedly met and interviewed in different places over many years. Nevertheless, all case studies seek to employ a diachronic approach that offers new insights into the ways in which multiple generations are involved in their negotiations over aspirations and mobilities.
The articles in this special section also address a geographical spread. As can be expected from a focus on mobility, people in these articles move. More importantly, the articles show how the trajectories of their lives, even without actual movements, bring various geographies into their ambit through family histories, value systems, strategies, and disruptions.
Mobility and Sedentarism
Migration scholarship has made an important contribution to understanding how humans relate to places by redirecting our attention away from sedentarism to the significance of mobilities in the globalized world. This redirecting opens onto an array of different patterns of moving the body across geographical space, as one particular dimension of mobility is being connected with aspirations in various ways. The contributions to this special issue demonstrate a broad variety of these intersections. Schultz, for example, demonstrates that the Southern Sudanese, who move between Juba, Khartoum, and several villages depend on being mobile. For the women, movement has become a strategy that they deem to be essential for their own and their family's survival. Due to the dire circumstances and recurrent crises, particularly in South Sudan, migration turns into a quotidian experience—it becomes normal. This normalization does not, however, mean that the women aspire to be mobile. While they dream of a “normal” life in a secure place that offers them the means to survive, they have accepted that the endless crises shaping their living conditions force them to consider mobility as a “normal” state of being. In the case of the Bangladeshi youth in Rome and also the international students at German universities, it becomes apparent that the imperative to move has shaped the aspirations of the original migrant generation. However, the younger people who are at the core of Priori's study consider staying in place as the better option, albeit under certain circumstances. While moving on to London, which is considered as the center of Bangladeshiness outside the country,7 offers a popular and desirable strategy also for these young migrants, Priori's interlocutors insist on staying in Rome. This choice can partly be interpreted as an attempt to resist the expectations imposed on them not only by their parents but also by the migrant community in general. For the youth, emplacement, in the sense of establishing a bodily and emotional bond with places, constitutes, under certain conditions, the most viable option for fulfilling their aspirations. In contrast, Spiegel's article focuses on a group of people who are usually not considered migrants but “expatriates.” In an attempt to move beyond this flawed distinction, she conceptualizes the highly mobile managers, who could be regarded as belonging to a transnational “tribe” or capitalist class,8 as highly privileged migrants whose mobility is initiated, regulated, organized, and supported by global capital. In their case, mobility is a requirement for being successful, and emplacement must continuously be resisted, even though some places resonate with aspirations more than others.
Transnational and Translocal Aspirations
Mobilities connect places. For many years, the constitution of transnational spaces or fields has become a structuring feature of (migratory) movements, networks, and other connectivity spanning across different places.9 Transnationalism has for this reason emerged as a key frame of migration and mobility studies scholarship. The articles in this special section demonstrate that aspirations not only emerge in the wider social context of transnational spaces, but also that they constitute place-connecting spaces. The Bangladeshi migrants in Rome, for example, are described as being in Italy and remaining in Bangladesh at the same time. Their lives are embedded in families and communities in different locales, which are themselves being connected by continuous flows of people, finance, and goods. Likewise, Priori's young people's future plans are embedded in what he calls “aspirational geographies,” which are constituted not just by an ideology of emigration, but also by more concrete considerations that compel the search for a better life elsewhere. Similarly, the lives of the managers investigated by Spiegel are embedded in their own aspirational geographies, which privilege certain spaces and places.
The practice of navigating across space to find the best options for oneself and one's family is also prevalent in Schultz's account of South Sudanese women. Although in this case the transnational dimension has become an ordering feature since South Sudan's independence in 2011, Schultz's work also shows the volatility of the ordering principle ascribed to national borders and urges us to think about such geographies more in terms of translocal spaces.10 This notion highlights the necessity to regard migration not only in terms of mobility across national boundaries but also within nation-states. This conjunction is particularly important in the Global South, where nation-states are a rather new phenomenon with, as the Sudan case illustrates, persistently volatile boundaries. Moreover, the notion of translocality reveals that migrants’ practices and, to a large extent, their imaginaries remain informed by their localized practices.11
This argument pertains to aspirations, insofar as individuals consider specific places as being suitable for realizing their dreams. Taking seriously the common critique toward the transnational approach—that such a perspective remains anchored in views on the world as being ordered by clearly remarkable geographical entities—the analysis of translocal spaces provides opportunities for including other entities and anchoring contexts. Pfaff-Czarnecka's German universities, which can be regarded as highly localized crystallization points to which students relate in their struggles to redefine their belonging, are a case in point. To some degree, the university replicates the families which serve as important reference points for individuals in their self-making projects. Translocality, thus, highlights the relational dimension of meaning-making and points to the multidirectional and sometimes overlapping networks that are being navigated by individuals.
Temporalities
Inevitably related to the spatial dimension as a principle guiding social analysis is temporality. In mobilities research, however, an overemphasis on the spatial has too often eclipsed the temporal dimension. While this gap has been filled over the last couple of years, it has also become clear that the relationship between mobility and time can be understood in many different ways. In the contributions to this special issue, the relevance of the temporal dimension is addressed, first, in methodological terms. Instead of providing brief snapshots of an individual's migratory experience, the contributions inquire into the long temporal dimension of mobility. Benefiting from many years of research experience in Sudan and what is today's South Sudan, during which Schultz maintained contact with her interlocutors and repeatedly interviewed them in different places and on different occasions, her work delineates how aspirations change over time. Moreover, her analysis highlights that aspirations are connected with different perspectives on movement and the necessity to be mobile, which change repeatedly during one's life-course. Although their research did not take place over such a long time-span, Pfaff-Czarnecka and Priori also stress the necessity to analyze students’ aspirations as generational expressions, historically situated in relation to their families and particularly their parents, who belong to the first generation of migrants in Germany and Italy.
Second, the relevance of the temporal dimension is addressed by looking at the ways in which the relationship between mobilities and aspirations intersects with temporalities. Aspiration, as a particular vector toward the actualization of future plans or prospects, inevitably leads us to the question of how past experiences shape future aspirations (and vice versa). This dynamic resonates in Schultz's and Spiegel's contributions, but it is made most evident by Pfaff-Czarnecka and Priori. The students in German universities share with those in Rome a strong conviction that their migration experiences determine their future options and, in turn, their future perspectives. Confronted with their parents’ often unfulfilled dreams and many sacrifices, the aspirations of the young migrants are embedded in a particular system of coordinates that fundamentally differs from those of students who grew up in families originating from the country of residence. Temporalities thus unfold at the intersection of different generations and structure the becoming of students in specific ways.
Spiegel's and Schultz's accounts touch more upon temporality in relation to the life course. The managers in Spiegel's work keep on moving from one destination to another, always in search of opportunities for self-optimization as part of the necessity to fulfill the ideal of an entrepreneurial self. Schultz's analysis of Sudanese migration demonstrates how moving across space, even transcending national borders, becomes a way of being, a “normal life,” which unfolds over a considerable span of years. The South Sudanese women whose lives Schultz engages with, particularly reveal how dreams of a normal life as well as the scope for realizing them change over time and how individuals deliberately choose different strategies, depending on the changing circumstances they are forced to live in.
Aspirational Mobilities: Social Status, Upward Mobility, and Movement
Aspiring to a good life means, as Priori rightly points out in his article, negotiating between “desires and opportunities.” In this context, spatial mobility can become an important strategy to be able to seize opportunities. All the articles here take up this relationship. Schultz's article, for example, draws a rather bleak picture of the opportunities that are available to her South Sudanese women respondents, whereas Pfaff-Czarnecka's and Priori's articles offer perhaps more optimistic accounts, revealing the continuities and discontinuities between the aspirations to upward mobility of original and second-generation migrants, and that young people carefully reflect on how to use the social capital that their families provide them access to.
The generations agree, however, that education is crucial, as it offers the most promising path to a higher socioeconomic status. The Bangladeshis in Rome demonstrate that they carefully weigh the educational opportunities that are available in Italy against the alternative option to migrate to Great Britain. Priori interprets this deliberation as the students’ attempt to question their parents’ conviction that only migration offers opportunities to climb the social ladder. Pfaff-Czarnecka provides an even more nuanced picture on how parents shape their children's aspirations and their capacity to realize their educational desires. The students at German universities constantly struggle with their experiences of being disadvantaged—and are more or less successful in finding compensatory strategies. For the highly skilled managers on whom Spiegel focuses, upward mobility is something they have already achieved and are struggling to retain. What Spiegel characterizes as these “entrepreneurial selves” are incessantly challenged to push personal boundaries, to improve, to succeed. To do so, they must deliberately search for the specific locations, or combinations of locations, where and through which these objectives can be achieved and avoid a professionally limiting sedentarism.
The four articles draw on rich empirical work into the life-worlds of their interlocutors. While placing these mobile—or motile—subjects in their spatial and temporal contexts, these articles also provide insights into important debates in mobilities scholarship and weave in the political economy of the specific life-world of the people they map. This special section thus brings together very different social and spatial contexts to show how one negotiates movement across time and space. In the process, it problematizes the binaries between mobility and sedentarism, illustrating how “aspirational geographies” create a complex interrelation between the two, and it defetishizes mobility by casting a careful gaze at mobility's (and immobility's) relation to migration and belonging. Priori shows how migration to a previous generation's dream destination is in fact often antithetical to mobility in a way that sedentarization in Italy is not, just as Pfaff-Czarnecka's work shows how mobility for her interlocutors had no necessary connection to spatial motility. Priori's respondents frame belonging through the material reality of possessing the capital to have a secure life and thus belong, something that also resonates with the young adults in Pfaff-Czarnecka's article. According to Schultz, spatial mobility has a very different meaning for the women living in perpetual disruption in a conflict-ridden context. The need to sustain oneself in a state of perpetual disruption meant that the women's lives were characterized by a fluidity through the pursuit of translocal lives; their aspiration was not of mobility, or even of belonging, but of normalcy. So too do the interlocutors in Spiegel's article negotiate a balance between emplacement and moving, often having to jettison the prospect of community in order to advance their careers.
The scale of spatiality from the translocal to the transregional to the global also allows for a nuanced reading of how imagined destinations are shaped, how networks play out, and, finally, how aspirations for mobility can be scaled. The articles also pay attention to how temporalities shape migratory mobilities. Time plays out not just as an indicator of life course but as an actor in itself, shaping the context of one's possibilities and allowing one to map changes.
Notes
Hein de Haas. “The Internal Dynamics of Migration Processes: A Theoretical Inquiry,” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 36, no. 10 (2010): 1587–1617,
Paolo Boccagni, “Aspirations and the Subjective Future of Migration: Comparing Views and Desires of the ‘Time Ahead’ Through the Narratives of Immigrant Domestic Workers,” Comparative Migration Studies 5, no. 4 (2017),
Michael Flamm and Vincent Kaufmann, “Operationalising the Concept of Motility: A Qualitative Study,” Mobilities 1, no. 2 (2006): 167–189,
Arjun Appadurai, “The Capacity to Aspire: Culture and the Terms of Recognition,” in Culture and Public Action: A Cross-Disciplinary Dialogue on Development Policy, ed. Michael Walton and Vijayendra Rao (Washington, DC: World Bank Publications, 2004), 59–84.
Katrin Renschler and Eva Gerharz, “The Challenge of Mastering One's Own Future—Students’ Negotiations of Mobility in Meghalaya, Northeast India,” in Universities as Transformative Social Spaces: Mobilities and Mobilizations from South Asian Perspectives, ed. Andrea Kolbel, Joanna Pfaff-Czarnecka, and Susan Thieme (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022), 87–114.
Kathrin Hörschelmann, “Theorising Life Transitions: Geographical Perspectives,” Area 43, no. 4 (2011): 378–383,
Claire Alexander, “Making Bengali Brick Lane: Claiming and Contesting Space in East London,” The British Journal of Sociology 62, no. 2 (2011): 201–220,
Leslie Sklair, The Transnational Capitalist Class (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001).
Nina Glick Schiller, “Theorising Transnational Migration in Our Times,” Nordic Journal of Migration Research 8, no. 4 (2018): 201–212,
Clemens Greiner and Patrick Sakdapolrak, “Translocality: Concepts, Applications and Emerging Research Perspectives,” Geography Compass 7, no. 5 (2013): 373–384,
Greiner and Sakdapolrak, “Translocality.”