An interdisciplinary workshop presented by ICS

In 2005 Conradson and Latham illuminated the importance of 'middling' forms of transnational migration, at the time a relatively neglected empirical space in comparison to studies of transnational elites on the one hand, and those migrating ‘out of poverty’ on the other. In the decade since, a diverse range of scholarship on ‘middling migration’ and ‘middling transnationalism’ has highlighted the everyday lives of migrants who occupy a privileged, but not elite, socio-economic stratum, and who often move for a combination of interwoven cultural, lifestyle and economic reasons. The concepts of ‘middling migration’ or ‘middling transnationalism’ however, remain somewhat undertheorized. Such concepts are often rather narrowly located within static notions of the ‘middle’ as a socio-economic status, that is, tied to studies of migrants who remain fixedly middleclass at home and away (Collins 2014). Such accounts elide the fact that for many migrants ‘of the middle’ today, migration involves varied social locations and relocations over time, with mobility’s affordances and limitations often structuring lives that oscillate between flexibility and precarity (Marcu 2005). ‘The middle space’ of migration studies may encompass migrants who often fall between or move across conventional typologies, crossing between skilled and unskilled work, economic desires and lifestyle desires, sojourn and settlement. It may also imply mobile lives that sit somewhere in between conventional definitions of ‘migrant’ versus ‘sojourner’, such as temporary workers, working holiday makers, and student-migrants. Mobilities of ‘the middle’ might also concern transnational mobility in relation to moments of life transition, in which increasingly extended and fragmented pathways between lifestages, such as youth and adulthood, working and retirement, singlehood and family formation, occur in relation to the formation and maintenance of transnational lives. This workshop seeks to bring together scholars from across the interdisciplinary fields of migration studies and transnational mobility scholarship to explore a rethinking of ‘the middle’ as an empirical and conceptual category.