resonates with Ley’s suggestion that, ‘There is a need to re-incorporate other
scales, including the regional, the national and the supranational but not yet
global, such as the European Union and other continental-scale trading networks.
... Moreover, jumping scales is an important necessity both in explanation and
in political practice’ (Ley 2004: 155). In order to locate translocal geographies
across scales, ‘metaphors of domination need to be mingled with metaphors of
vulnerability, images of global reach with those of parochialism, a discourse of
detachment with one of partisanship’ (Ley 2005: 157). Taking into account such
diversity of scales and the spaces therein, we can examine migrants’ locations
within simultaneous positions of power and powerlessness in different places;
migrants’ access to different spaces of social networks and capital; and migrants’
embodied and material locations across different places that are not necessarily
about transnationalism but rather about translocal geographies of movement.
Situatedness across scales
How then do we theoretically examine the multiscalar situatedness of migrants’
experiences? How do we account for the different ways that their experiences
reach across different scales of movement – regional, national, rural, urban,
neighbourhood, homes and bodies? How do we examine these scales not as
separate entities; rather as a set of multiple affiliations enacted across space and
time(s) by those who move and even by those who do not?
In this book, we find the notion of ‘habitus’(Bourdieu 2002) a useful heuristic
tool to examine the situatedness of migrants across scales of experience. ‘Habitus’
as a field of practice was developed by Bourdieu as a way of bridging across
structure and agency. The habitus produces a negotiation in the field which takes
shape through exchange across different types of capital – social, cultural and
symbolic. It is in the field that individuals learn the ‘rules of the game’ in valuing
different types of capital and learning how to exchange one for the other. And it
is in doing so that the highly subjective values associated with different forms of
capital, become objective criteria for differentiation. The field then works beyond
economic exchanges through the use of networks and connections as social capital,
and institutional or symbolic assets as cultural capital. This means that in different
fields of practice each form of capital acquires objective value through a set of
subjective negotiations, and their exchange into another form of capital is then
made possible using these objective markers.
There are many critiques of habitus as a field of practice (see King 2000 for
example), which