Translation and transformation of class through migration: rethinking social and spatial mobility across contexts

This issue of Current Sociology Monographs explores new conceptual opportunities at the intersection of migration studies and the sociology of class. The contributions examine migration as a distinct site where class is translated and transformed, using rich, empirically specific cases to show how social class is experienced and produced relationally, transnationally and temporally through the lives of migrants. Through this focus, the papers conceptualise class as a mobile process that travels with migrants, links different contexts and is translated through movement. Distinct from paradigms that tend to universalise a particular narrative or definition of class, this issue adopts a comparative and inductive approach aimed at exploring tensions between the universal and the particular. The contributions share a commitment to qualitative enquiry that attends to the particular, affective and experiential dimensions of class as shared and expressed by migrants, using these as an entry point to retheorise class ‘on the move’. Incorporating ethnography, life histories, intergenerational approaches and spatial mapping, the authors inductively examine how class shapes migrants’ lived experiences in diverse contexts. Some researchers follow participants across borders, whereas others trace the imaginative trajectories through which migrants recall and explain their movements. Contributions orient their analyses around relationality, transnationality and temporality, showing how class emerges as inherently processual and mobile, linking the personal and the global, the embodied and the institutional, and pasts and futures. Each link foregrounds translation and transformation as both an empirical process and a methodological sensibility, demonstrating how migration unsettles the taken-for-granted and provides opportunities to reconsider established theories of class.