Rethinking Privilege and Social Mobility in Middle-Class Migration

This volume explores the experiences of a wide variety of middle-class migrant groups across the globe, including ‘ethnic entrepreneurs’ building new businesses in cosmopolitan neighbourhoods in Sydney; Chinese grandparents shuttling between Australia, China and Singapore to support their extended families; well-off young Indians in Mumbai strategising their future education pathways overseas; and Japanese mothers finding ways to belong in a London middle-class neighbourhood. This book asks how relatively privileged migrant groups negotiate their life trajectories, relationships and aspirations while ‘on the move’ and how they transform the communities and societies that they move between across time and space. The book’s chapters consider motives for migration, as well as experiences of risk, uncertainty and insecurity in diverse local contexts. A fresh look at the migration of those who possess skills and resources that can bring about significant economic, social and cultural change, this book engages critically with the notions of ‘middling’ migration, social mobility and mobile privilege in the global context of hardening borders and immigration complexity. It will appeal to scholars with interests in contemporary forms of migration and mobility and their local and transnational consequences.

Shanthi Robertson is an Associate Professor in the School of Humanities and Communication Arts and Research Fellow in the Institute for Culture and Society at Western Sydney University, Australia. She is the author of Transnational Student-Migrants and the State: The Education-Migration Nexus and Temporality in Mobile Lives: Contemporary Asia-Australia Migration and Lived Time

Rosie Roberts is a Senior Lecturer within UniSA Creative and a researcher at the Creative People, Products and Places Research Centre (CP3) at the University of South Australia. She is the author of Ongoing Mobility Trajectories: Lived Experiences of Global Migration.