Bidet, Jennifer
Displacements
- 2019.
71
To what extent can spatial mobility, movement within a physical geography, be interpreted as the materialization of social mobility, of movement within a social geography? And to what extent can this geographical movement be itself a factor of social mobility? Starting from these classical questions, which remain understudied in the case of international migrations, this article offers tentative reflections about the analysis of social dynamics that operate beyond the national scale. Against approaches to migrations that are overly focused on cultural adaptation, it seeks to understand migrant trajectories as social trajectories spanning several social geographies that are defined, by default, as national ones. While one must reconstruct complete migration trajectories in a way that objectivizes the initial social position and the social position of arrival as well as their interrelation, it also seems necessary to go beyond the scale of individual or collective trajectories in order to grasp the relations and intersections between the social spaces within which these trajectories are deployed.